Context, international cooperation

Our organisation

What is it that we try to achieve?

Our mission is to improve the performance of individuals, organisations and businesses that deliver social change.

Who are we?

We are a group of professionals who use business principles to promote social change in order to combat poverty, resist exclusion and counter violation of human rights.

We are a social business. This means that we generate our own income while we pursue our mission. We earn our own income from assignments, but for us social impact is more important than earning a profit.

We position ourselves in between (the practice of) social entrepreneurship, development work, public policy and academic communities. We aim to combine the best of these three worlds.

Both as individual professionals and as a company we are well connected to social entrepreneurs, local businesses, development organisations, policy makers and academics in Africa (mainly East and South Africa), Asia (mainly South Asia and indo-China) and Europe (the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the UK).

How do we work?

We believe in the power of co-creation and always work closely together with our client organisations/customers, partner organisations and other stakeholders to create social value.

We do not perceive citizens as voters, volunteers, clients, consumers, or powerless outsiders but we believe that each individual can be a potential problem solvers and co-creators of public and private goods. Therefore, the active involvement of people is paramount in all the work that we are involved in.

We ourselves perform different professional roles varying from process facilitator to advisor and expert. We work both at strategic and at operational (hands on) level Our strength is indeed that we continuously interchange between these two levels, that is feeding the strategic debate by bringing in operational knowledge and experience (best practices), and vice versa improving development activities through enhanced strategic thinking.

We believe furthermore that there can be no action without learning; and no learning without action. We work experience-based – in the tradition of Paolo Freire, Myles Horton, Reg Revans and David Kolb and start from where people are.

What are our areas of expertise?

Our core competencies lie in the following areas:

Co-creation: how to engage citizens in change processes.

Social entrepreneurship: understand how business principles can be used to promote social change.

Social and economic impact assessment notably of social businesses and value chains: integrating non financial returns in the cost-benefit equation. How to learn from success and failure.

Collaborative action research: exploration of new issues with multiple stakeholders.

Capacity development of individuals, teams, development organisations and social businesses.