Our Team
JESCA Solutions LLC has a diverse core team of highly qualified professionals in all our focus areas with expereince in development finance institutions, international organizations, UN agencies, private international development consulting firms, international and local NGOs, the private sector, and national and local governments. We have managed projects in different capacities in the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa and are fluent in English, Hindi, Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole.
Dr. P. Stanley Yoder
Ph.D, Sr. Qualitative Research Specialist
Dr Stanley P. Yoder, PhD is a social and medical anthropologist who has spent his career designing and directing research on health-related issues in African countries. In graduate school at UCLA, he earned a Masters
In African Studies, an MPH, and a PhD in anthropology. His dissertation research was conducted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he lived in small Cokwe villages to serve as an apprentice to local healers in order to understand the basis of their medical practice. He also studied popular knowledge of illness and treatments in order to understand how families diagnose illnesses and select treatments. Yoder’s dissertation described local knowledge of illness and healing as well as the more esoteric knowledge and practice of local healers.
Yoder’s focus on the study of local knowledge of illness, and the methods he used to understand local decision-making, served him well in his career as consultant and research director working in west, east, central, and southern Africa. He spent seven years as part of a research team based at the
Annenberg School of Communication of the University of Pennsylvania that evaluated the impact of the health communication projects of the Academy for Educational Development. He spent another 17 years working as the qualitative research specialist with the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) group of Macro International based in Silver Spring, MD. DHS has had a USAID contract since 1984 to conduct nationally representative surveys related to morbidity, mortality, family planning, HIV/AIDS, and related topics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yoder was asked to design and direct research projects related to local understanding of survey issues, or HIV/AIDS, or taking antiretrovirals for HIV infection, or family planning, or child health.in African countries
Thanks to his experience, Yoder has become an expert in research design and research proposals, in questionnaire development, in training interviewers and supervising qualitative and quantitative research projects, and in the analysis of qualitative research data. He has specialized in the study of local knowledge and experience related to health and healing as well as other topics. He has extensive experience in the development of questioning guides and questionnaires in local languages. He has directed research in more than 20 countries in Africa. He is fluent in French and has worked in Portuguese, Swahili, and Cokwe (Chokwe, Quioco).
