Karam Shaar Advisory Ltd. is a limited-liability consulting company registered in New Zealand (business number: 9429048957441).

​

​

Services

​

​Our work mainly focuses on Syria’s economy and how it interacts with politics (political economy). We are especially interested in macroeconomics, monetary economics, energy, aid, war economics, actor mapping, and sanctions. Here’s a list of the standardized services we can help you with:

​

​

Policy Consulting

​

• Oral updates and consulting: Such updates are particularly useful in the early stages of policy formation.

• Policy briefs: Punchy briefs of less than 1,000 words with a focus on practical recommendations. A brief can be turned around in less than 72 hours.

• Policy research: All our policy research is data-driven—be it primary or secondary data—to facilitate original value. We guarantee access to all parts of Syria for primary data collection. Because the expense and time required for completing such projects depends on the scope, the cost of this service must be quoted on a case-by-case basis.

​

​

Coaching and Training

​

We provide group and one-on-one coaching or training sessions for recently appointed diplomats and the staff of international and local organizations working in Syria. These sessions can be arranged on an hourly or daily basis.

​

​

Peer Review of Unpublished Policy and Academic Reports

​

One of the services Dr Karam Shaar enjoys most is going through unpublished work and providing feedback. This can be done at different stages of writing:

• At the scoping stage, he proposes appropriate research tools and the skeleton of the report.

• For near-final reports, he gives feedback on the soundness, clarity, and correctness of stated arguments and presented visualizations.

​

​

Interactive Visualizations

​

We can help you communicate large datasets effectively using interactive visualizations. We usually design a static version of the visualization, describe its functionality, and later work with in-house programmers on the implementation. We provide two types of visualizing services:

• Bespoke visualizations, built from scratch to utilise all valuable aspects of the data and tailored to meet the needs of your audience. These visualizations appear in different formats on PC and mobile devices. Here you can see a dataset, which would have required tens of pages to be presented as a table, rendered instead as a single visualization. Similar examples of earlier work can be found here, here, here, and here. Depending on the complexity, these visualizations may take up to a few weeks to be developed and tested.

• Typical visualizations. If your dataset is typical, and you’re willing to lose some customizability in the visualization, you can opt for cheaper and ready-made visualization packages, such as Tableau and PowerBi. An example can be found here.

​

​

Operational Research

​

We provide Third-Party Monitoring, Capacity Assessment, and Monitoring and Evaluation (MEAL) services. We have led the implementation of such projects with a vast range of partners, including Christian Aid, Expertise France, The Day After, Search for Common Ground, Rozana, Enab Baladi, Arta FM, Basmeh and Zeitooneh, and Kesh Malek. Because these projects can range widely in terms of complexity and implementation duration, they are discussed and priced on a case-by-case basis.

​

​

Due Diligence

​

We have access to a wide network of informants, businesspeople, and government officials in Syria. We use this access to provide due diligence services for background checks on individuals and entities for various purposes, such as imposing unilateral sanctions, KYC, offering citizenships, and providing evidence for criminal cases.

​