Photo credit: AVSI Foundation
Since 2016, Trickle Up has been steadily building our internal capacity to deliver effective technical assistance to partners, ranging from UN organizations and municipal governments to community-based and non-governmental organizations. Our goal is to support the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of high-quality, participant-centered economic inclusion programs.
As international aid continues to shrink, the case for locally led development is becoming stronger. It is both a moral imperative and a pragmatic solution, respecting the agency, lived experience, and expertise of local communities and ensuring that aid aligns with their priorities and realities. It harnesses the power of local knowledge, institutions, and networks to deliver cost-effective, impactful results while reducing dependency on external actors.
How Locally Adapted Coaching Supports Lasting Change
As locally led development becomes more central to the global agenda, there is a growing need for technical approaches that are both flexible and responsive to local contexts. With that, Trickle Up is committed to ensuring that our approaches, processes, and tools are adapted to the needs of the local implementing partners, while upholding core standards of quality and technical rigor.
Coaching, a core component of many economic inclusion programs, offers a clear example of the importance of adapting to local needs. In 2018, Trickle Up developed a flexible coaching toolkit that could be easily adapted by local partners to support them in delivering participant-centered guidance across a range of contexts. Since then, this toolkit has been customized with ten partners across eight countries, helping 16,000 participants graduate out of poverty into economic empowerment, resilience, and social inclusion.
These experiences highlight an important lesson: even tools and interventions that have been successfully implemented globally require careful adaptation to local contexts to be effective. Through our partnerships with local partners, Trickle Up brings proven approaches and tools, like our coaching toolkit, to our partners’ economic inclusion programming, jump-starting their design and implementation of high-quality activities. However, ensuring relevance of those tools—whether through translation into local languages, updated imagery, or culturally resonant delivery methods—is critical.
Tailoring Tools That Empower Coaches and Communities
Adapting tools for local relevance requires a thoughtful, participatory process. To ensure that our methodologies and tools align with local contexts, we begin by working with local partners to assess learning needs, existing resources, and training delivery systems. This includes interviews, focus groups, observation sessions, and facilitated workshops to identify and prioritize the attitudes, skills, and knowledge the coaching tools should address. Together, we also consider the profile of both coaches and learners—such as literacy levels and learning preferences—as well as the environment where the toolkit will be deployed, and the pedagogical approaches that will be most effective. Then, we work alongside our partners to lead or support the adaptation of these core tools to seamlessly integrate into their economic inclusion programs.
This collaborative approach was central to the Graduating to Resilience in Uganda Activity (2017–2024), where Trickle Up supported AVSI in adapting and testing its coaching tools and methodologies. The program reached 13,200 households, with coaching tailored to support the project’s theory of change, exploring individual and group coaching and incorporating key messages on nutrition, water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), and gender-based violence.
The coaching process was invaluable for participants. According to the Activity’s Coaching Needs Assessment, 97.4% of participants considered coaching beneficial and relevant in addressing their household needs. Nearly half (49%) reported increased self-efficacy, while 30% noted it helped strengthen their social networks. r, participants found their coaches to be available and supportive, seeking them out for guidance in resolving household conflicts. Beyond individual growth, coaching played a key role in shifting gender norms at the household and community levels, and improved outcomes in household nutrition and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) practices. These results highlight how adapting coaching tools through a locally driven process can lead to a wide-ranging and lasting impact.
From App to Action
With generous funding from the Cisco Foundation, efforts are now underway at Trickle Up to digitize proven coaching methodologies and tools through the development of Coach Up, a global hybrid coaching curriculum that guides and equips coaches to support economic inclusion participants to build economic empowerment, resilience, and social inclusion. Delivered via a modular mobile application, Coach Up includes core coaching sessions that can then be adapted for local contexts. The platform allows for translation into local languages, the integration of region-specific content, and even the use of geographic-specific avatars to enhance relatability and engagement.
In the coming year, Coach Up will be piloted as part of the Ultra Poor Graduation for Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups in Jharkhand (PVTG) project in Jharkhand, India, funded by the Whole Planet Foundation. In collaboration with local partner Pravah, the project team will translate Coach Up modules into Hindi, develop India-specific avatars, and tailor coaching modules to include locally relevant messages—for example, promoting savings through government-sponsored Self-Help Groups.
To support implementation, local coaches will be trained using a comprehensive methodology focused on facilitation skills, household visit techniques, and technical coaching topics. This capacity-building approach ensures that coaches are not only familiar with the Coach Up app itself, but also confident in using it as a day-to-day resource to guide and support participants through coaching activities.
Laying the Foundation for Scalable, Sustainable Inclusion
The PVTG project in Jharkhand, India, will serve as a testing ground to refine the Coach Up application, with an eye toward broader adoption across India. Through partnerships with BRAC, the Chhattisgarh State Rural Livelihoods Mission (Ch-SRLM) under the Inclusive Livelihoods Program (ILP), and the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM)–which aims to reach up to 25 million women over the next two years—there is strong potential to scale this methodology. These collaborations create a powerful opportunity to integrate proven, data-driven coaching approaches into public systems, expanding both reach and impact while ensuring that the most vulnerable populations are not only included, but empowered.
The development and systematization of adaptable coaching tools is just one way in which Trickle Up and economic inclusion programming is evolving to meet local needs. By centering the priorities and capacities of our local partners, we can help ensure the delivery of high-quality, participant-centered programs that are both effective and sustainable at scale.
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