Why the company exists
The people who know what is happening in a place are usually the local journalists. Everything we build starts there.
The information exists.
It is not where people look
I spent twenty years as an investigative reporter and risk analyst, most of it in Latin America, and then a decade building the data systems that try to close the gap between what is known in a place and what reaches a desk in London or New York.
The people who know what is happening somewhere are the journalists who live there. Very little of what they know reaches the wires, because nobody is paying for it to. Meanwhile the money goes to exactly those places. Emerging-market supply chains run through provinces and districts no correspondent covers, and it is there that a licence, a workforce or a road decides whether an asset keeps running.
EchoFrame is built on that gap. Find what local reporting already knows, check it against official records, physical data and markets, and read the meaning out of it, and you can see where something is going while there is still time to act on it.
Robert Shaw, founder
How we look
at the world
Political events rarely speak for themselves. Our work starts with the evidence and the people behind it.
On EchoFrame’s approach
Reflections from contributors to EchoFrame’s work.
“EchoFrame's probabilistic risk modeling is set to disrupt how open-source analysis is done, helping clients manage risk before it manages them.”
“EchoFrame's spatial analytics and network modeling bring academic rigor to real-world analysis, the kind of methodological depth that's rare in the open-source research space.”
Frequently asked questions
Who is EchoFrame for?
Oil and gas government affairs teams, funds underwriting a political or counterparty assumption, and commodity traders and large agribusiness and food-security groups with origination, farmland or livestock exposure in emerging markets. What they have in common is a decision that turns on somewhere the wires do not cover. Each engagement starts with a defined policy, actor, counterparty, or asset question.
Which countries do you cover?
Collection runs in Venezuela. Colombia, Mexico, Rwanda and Pakistan are being built. Tell us where you operate and we will tell you plainly whether we cover it.
What can a private briefing cover?
Bring the decision you face, the assets or contracts involved, and your time horizon. We can discuss a stakeholder brief, a policy milestone note, a thesis-question register, or another research format suited to that question.
How do you know something is true before you send it?
Reporting is checked before it is allowed to count. Who says this, how would they know, and who else confirms it independently. Four outlets running the same unnamed official is one piece of unconfirmed information, not four. Everything carries the date it was confirmed and the sourcing beside the claim, so you can check the basis rather than take our word.
Can our own people be trained to run this?
Yes. The Frame Bureau is the training division. Five modules take a group from finding and checking material through to writing the call, and the measure of success is that they can staff their own desk without us in the room.
How do we start?
Send us a question through the contact form. Share a bounded research question and the date that matters. Scope, access, and delivery are discussed directly.