Across economic inclusion programs worldwide, coaching sits at the heart of impact and at the center of cost. Personalized, frequent accompaniment helps participants build confidence, manage risk, and turn resources into lasting livelihoods. Yet, as programs scale, coaching often becomes the single largest cost driver, raising a critical question: how can we preserve high-quality coaching while dramatically reducing delivery costs?
At Trickle Up, we are actively exploring multiple pathways to answer this question. From group-based and digitally enabled coaching models to partnerships with local institutions, our goal is clear: to design coaching systems that are effective, culturally grounded, and financially sustainable at scale. We are about to try something quite innovative through a new pilot with Caritas Man in Côte d’Ivoire, beginning in summer 2026.
Why Faith-Based Networks?
In Côte d’Ivoire—as in many developing country contexts—churches and faith-based organizations of any background are deeply embedded in community life. They are often long-standing, trusted institutions that play an active role in guidance, mentorship, and social support for their communities. These are institutions that are often visited by community members multiple times over the course of a week and have a high frequency of engagement with program participants—something that is a critical element of building trust. These qualities align closely with what effective economic inclusion coaching requires: trust, proximity, continuity, and moral authority.
Rigorous evidence reinforces this intuition. Research by Innovations for Poverty Action with International Care Ministries’ Transform program in the Philippines, shows that delivering economic inclusion through trusted, faith-based networks can strengthen psychosocial outcomes, aspiration-building, and long-term resilience. Transform leverages ICM’s large network of pastors and the pastors’ social capital in villages to deliver coaching to last-mile locations at lower costs. This experience has sparked our interest in exploring faith-based groups as a pathway for delivering cost-efficient coaching at scale.
A Pilot in Man: Testing a New Coaching Model
Building on these insights, Trickle Up is launching a women-centered economic inclusion pilot in partnership with Caritas in Man, Côte d’Ivoire, with implementation beginning in summer 2026. Though we are still in the design phase, we anticipate that the pilot will target female beneficiaries of the national social safety net living in rural areas around Man, organized into Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs).
In this pilot, rather than relying on externally recruited, salaried caseworkers, Trickle Up will train and equip Caritas community volunteers (“bénévoles”) to deliver coaching. While the pilot design is still being finalized, recently in Côte d’Ivoire we determined that coaching will likely combine group sessions anchored in VSLA meetings with light-touch individual follow-up, provided by trained church volunteers. These volunteers are already engaged with Caritas and perform roles such as psychosocial counseling, savings group facilitation, and mentoring.
This approach leverages three core advantages. First, cost efficiency: by relying on community-based volunteer coaches, the model significantly reduces recurrent staffing costs. Second, quality and trust are strengthened, as coaches are already embedded in participants’ social and community lives, enhancing relevance, consistency, and engagement. Finally, faith-based networks provide an existing infrastructure that can support expansion at scale without the need to build parallel delivery systems.
A Clear Learning Agenda
For us, this is not just a small pilot; it is primarily a learning effort to better understand how partnering with faith-based organizations can be a more effective and cost-efficient means of program delivery. Trickle Up is currently holding conversations with Innovations for Poverty Action and hoping to design a research approach to assess how this type of coaching model can be scaled.
Together with Caritas and IPA, Trickle Up will document what works, for whom, and under what conditions. Key questions include: How does volunteer-led coaching compare to traditional models? What training, incentives, and supervision are required to maintain quality standards? And where are the limits of this approach?
By rigorously testing an economic inclusion program that leverages the existing infrastructure of faith-based organizations and introduces a new coaching model, Trickle Up aims to contribute practical evidence to a field grappling with how to scale economic inclusion coaching sustainably.
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