Our Clients · Development & Humanitarian Organizations
Program support in a world of volatile funding, access and security.
Scenario planning, economic and impact analysis, and funding-trend assessments for development and humanitarian organizations working in the Red Sea region.
How we do it
We assemble “dream teams” of specialists and data to address complex operational and strategic challenges related to the Red Sea basin and MENA states. Every engagement is informed by one or more analytic frameworks — including bias identification, scenario planning, red-teaming, and environmental and social impact analysis.
Our biggest asset is our experts — a meticulously-built pool of regional and technical specialists and management leads, each with career experience in-region. A team of lead experts ‘deconstructs’ the challenge at hand, while Big Red™, our proprietary agentic model, mines our experts’ publications and work histories to identify those best equipped to respond to the challenge. It assists with the formation of tailored queries, while drawing on our custom databases and relevant contextual data. The result is an interactive process that creates a constantly improving resource that is available to the client to address future issues.
What we offer
Scenario planning
Plausible futures, the signposts to watch, and what each means for your plans.
Economic analysis
Growth, trade and fiscal trends that shape your programming.
Geopolitical risk
Sovereign behavior, conflict spillover, chokepoint disruption.
Risk analysis
Security, operational and reputational risk across your portfolio.
Social and environmental impact analysis
What programs change for communities and ecosystems, measured.
Funding trends
Where donor and Gulf development finance is heading, and what it means for your revenue.
Opportunity assessments
Where new partners, funders and programs fit your mandate.
Convenings
We also shape the content of summits and conferences: themes and session structure, the right combination of speakers, and proceedings and publications produced with our design partner, Kulturalis.
Sample client profile
A multilateral body, development finance institution, donor, or humanitarian organization planning against a horizon that keeps moving — donor priorities shifting, new funders entering, a single budget cycle resetting the assumptions under a decade of programming. The perspectives that would test those assumptions sit outside the organization and reaching them in time is the constraint.
Client Testimonial
“Red Sea Futures managed — quickly — to obtain deeply relevant external stakeholder, competitor, and analyst perspectives on an existential organizational challenge. A rich scenario analysis that was both unique and immediately actionable.”
Past Engagements
- Forecasting development finance to 2030. A major multilateral organization wanted a nuanced projection of how overseas development assistance might evolve through 2030, and what a changing funding environment would do to its revenue and its operations. One area of particular interest was the evolving role of the Arab Gulf states in development finance and humanitarian assistance, and how the organization could best frame its own history and competitive advantages to generate more impact and more government clients. We created a scenario analysis that relied on our own proprietary agentic model and vetted sources, queried our own pool of experts on the parts of the underlying forecast, and generated a 360-degree analysis for strategy.Read the case study →
- Specialist capacity where it is suddenly needed. During the Arab Spring, we recruited U.S. teaching hospitals and emergency-medicine capacity into Benghazi, Libya, linking world-class institutions — among them Harvard University, Yale University, and the African Federation for Emergency Medicine — to very difficult logistics problems in the field. We provided the on-the-ground expertise, the connections, and the risk assessment that let outside specialists operate where they otherwise could not. We repeated the model: in Djibouti and Turkey with EyePACS, an organization that diagnosed diabetic retinopathy; and in 2020, in a program linking three UAE hospitals with teaching hospitals in the United States and Libya to share COVID-19 best practices during the pandemic. Convening scarce specialist capacity where it is suddenly needed — in a conflict, for chronic-disease screening, in a pandemic — is the same coordination problem our clients bring us today.
Red Sea Futures marries three capabilities most clients have to buy separately: research and AI, strategy, and the capacity to implement. Not every engagement needs all three — clients engage the parts they need.
Bring us your most challenging Red Sea and MENA questions.
Test the method against your most pressing question — a 30-minute briefing, no long-term commitment. We've spent decades in the region; it shows in the work.