Our purpose

“Capacity building initiatives have not been able to achieve results that are likely to be sustainable and enduring once donor engagement has come to an end. In large part this failure has been a consequence of the difficulties international capacity builders have had in engaging with complex local actors, circumstances and political environments, in which actors are multiple, agency is negotiated, and outcomes are dynamic and iterative. Many of these activities have prioritized forms of external technical and expert approaches over embedded forms of local knowledge, practices and ways of doing things.”

The above text is from a 2018 paper on EU local capacity building programmes. It points to the dire need for an expert agency whose primary aim is to strengthen local actors using local knowledge and practices. Local people and local organisations often lack the competencies to fully capitalise on their ideas. Yet, they embody the local knowledge of development challenges and socio-economic opportunities in a country context that is not always understood well by players external to this context. By strengthening local resources at all levels (grassroots/community members, informal businesses, Micro-, Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises or MSMEs, middle class workers, etc.) in their knowledge set, mindset, skill set and tool set, we ensure they are better equipped and more confident to seize opportunities on an increasingly competitive African continent.