When the team at Seed Global Development completed an analysis for a client report on modern slavery, members saw something others had missed. They detailed how climate change drives displacement and migration, creating vulnerability to human trafficking and forced labor.
“This was an interesting case study, because our client was focused purely on migration,” says founder and CEO Mohammad Farrae. “When we started working with them, we asked if they had considered climate change — and they hadn't. But if you don't account for it, you don't capture the whole story.”
The trend, although well established by researchers, remains underappreciated in policy circles. And the team’s findings helped their client reconsider the issue from a new angle, providing it with a more effective understanding of the challenge.
Adding that level of insight is an area where the team excels, and its approach traces back to how its members were trained, and how they have adapted to a fast-changing global development landscape.
Thinking holistically, adapting nimbly
The four professionals behind Seed Global Development share a common starting point: All are graduates of the Master of Global Affairs program at the University of Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs.
That's not coincidental. The firm emerged in the wake of significant cuts to U.S. government funding for USAID, which left many development professionals, including early-career alumni, suddenly without roles. Conversations among Keough School graduates in Washington, D.C. raised a shared question: What if this knowledge and experience could be organized to help partners tackle global challenges?
The answer was an agile, network-based consulting model that draws on the expertise of the Keough School’s alumni, faculty and institutes as needed. As the firm’s core team takes on new projects, it taps subject-matter experts to address specific challenges, scaling up or down depending on what a client requires.
One of the firm’s first projects supported the United Arab Emirates’ innovative work in climate-smart agriculture. In recent years, the country has positioned itself as a global leader in this area, in part by hosting the United Nations’ 28th climate change conference, known as the Conference of Parties, in 2023.
To support this, Seed Global conducted a review of a UAE food systems scorecard that evaluates how comprehensively countries have integrated these systems into their climate commitments.
“Our work validated our client’s initial assessment,” Farrae says, “and also provided contextual insights to refine its analysis, strengthening its overall scoring system.”
Learning to consult in the real world
Team members say their experiential learning at the Keough School has shaped how they think and work.
A key pillar of the school’s experiential learning is the Integration Lab (i-Lab), where students work in teams with external partners to address live policy problems, a process that stretches across multiple semesters. Students work alongside government agencies and private-sector partners. They conduct fieldwork, refine analysis and ultimately deliver recommendations designed to inform real-world decisions.
“The i-Lab was where I first learned what it really means to be a consultant in international development,” says Emma Hokoda, Seed Global’s design and implementation lead. As a student, she was part of a team that partnered with Catholic Relief Services Nigeria to strengthen agricultural-based livelihoods. They worked in an area where 40 percent of residents lived below the international poverty line, making less than $2 per day.
For Hokoda, that experience reinforced the power of centering local perspectives when exploring solutions.
“I quickly realized that the perfect instrument designed in your head in the United States looks very different when it meets the realities on the ground,” Hokoda says. “The i-Lab taught me to stay curious, adapt quickly and trust the people closest to the context.”
For Farrae, a key lesson of his Keough School experience was the distance between scholarship, on the one hand, and policy and practice, on the other. The school addresses that dynamic with its evidence-to-action focus, working to ensure that change-makers on the ground have access to usable research insights.
“Practitioners don't always have a user-friendly way to access the most recent and relevant findings,” Farrae says. “One of our goals is to ensure research insights help inform the actual work taking place on the ground.”
Putting people at the center
That emphasis on evidence is paired with another principle the team traces directly to their training: placing human dignity at the center of the work.
It’s an orientation that Aidé Cuenca Narváez, the firm’s research and learning lead, understands personally. Growing up in a lower-income community in Ecuador, she saw firsthand how development interventions could overlook the very people they were meant to serve, failing to treat them as partners with insights and agency. By contrast, the Keough School’s people-first approach drew her to Notre Dame and continues to inform her perspective.
“As a master of global affairs student, I saw how we can view these challenges not only from a theoretical point of view, but also in a way that considers the human side of things,” she says. “We know we work with people who will be impacted by whatever our report says, by whatever advice we give to policymakers, governments and international organizations. That is an important vision that continues to guide our work.”
Olfa Jelassi, Seed Global’s strategy and partnerships lead, says dignity shapes everything the firm does. “We bring values like dignity and human-centered design — things that we learned at the Keough School — to our projects,” says Jelassi, a Tunisian civil society expert who has extensive experience working on gender and climate issues. “It shapes not just our technical analysis and methods, but also our overall vision.”
Farrae agrees.
“We envision a world where each person, and the whole person, is treated with dignity and flourishes in the right relationship with themselves, others and the natural world,” he says. “That focus drives our work, our partnerships, and ultimately, our impact.”