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A new way of listening

At Decodis, we believe that actively giving people the space to express themselves as they wish – in their own language, in their own dialect, in their own voice – elevates our understanding of their lived experiences and opinions. We realize this principle by offering impact investors, private corporations, thinktanks, NGOs and governments nuanced insight into the perspectives of the populations they serve. We use methods that are high-powered, scalable and low-cost; and have proven to be effective in helping organizations get to the heart of the matter.

team

Meet the Team

Daryl Collins, PhD

Daryl Collins, PhD

CEO and Founder

Dr. Daryl Collins is Decodis' CEO and Founder. She is a pioneer working at the intersection of finance and human vulnerability.

Marcia Almeida Mendes

Marcia Almeida Mendes

Chief of Staff

Marcia is a storyteller who uses her background in Applied Linguistics and International Development to handle Decodis' outputs and oversee our media and communications efforts.

Maria Pia Torres

Maria Pia Torres

Project Manager

Maria Pia is a Project Manager and uses her cross-sector experience and her unique analytical skills to lead multi-country research projects at Decodis.

Derry Moore, PhD

Derry Moore, PhD

Director of Linguistics

Derry Moore is the Lead Linguist at Decodis and uses his unique capabilities in understanding the cross between social engagement and language as a foundation to our methods.

Nicki Smith

Nicki Smith

Director of Finance and Administration

Nicki is a natural problem-solver and she sees to the financial, compliance and operation needs of our company.

Eve Andeka

Eve Andeka

Project Assistant

Eve is an experienced communications professional with a journalism background. At Decodis, she is instrumental in the effective running of our data collection which involves skits and innovative ways of listening.

Pravarakya Reddy

Pravarakya Reddy

Director of Data Analytics

Prava is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) specialist who started his career as a Software Engineer and later pivoted to analytics and data science with focus on NLP.

Dhananjay Agarwal

Dhananjay Agarwal

Senior Solution Architect

Dhananjay is an experienced data scientist, engineer and developer. He is in charge of our robust database together with the Data Analytics team.

Our Story

by Dr. Daryl Collins, CEO and Founder

I've been doing research on vulnerable populations for over twenty years, but something has been increasingly troubling me. I get the feeling that people have just been telling us what they think we want to hear.
 

The stories I was hearing were far too simple. Only if I spent a longer period of time interviewing them, such as with the Financial Diaries research method I co-innovated as the basis of Portfolios of the Poor, did I achieve a real understanding of their experiences and opinions, which were messy and complicated. But lengthy fieldwork is frustratingly expensive, onerous to execute and not scalable. I heard similar experiences from peers in different parts of the globe who struggled to make quality social research with increasing constraints.
 

I founded Decodis to solve that problem. Using proven technologies in innovative ways, our team at Decodis is creating tools to access even deeper understandings than I could with Diaries, but in a more agile, cheap and scalable way.


Join us in reimagining social research.

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