Inclusive Growth

Helping to harness economic growth in order to reduce poverty, ensuring that growth is inclusive of marginalised and excluded communities who live and work in developing countries.

Supporting inclusive growth requires expanding economic opportunities. This includes engaging the private sector to create employment opportunities and supporting them to access markets for marginalised and excluded groups. Simultaneously, this requires extending the provision of basic and affordable utilities to these communities, ensuring they are resilient in the face of climate change and changes to livelihoods.

An Inclusive Growth approach considers why excluded communities such as women and girls, young people, the urban and rural poor and ethnic minorities are unable to access economic opportunities and receive basic utilities. Designing responses to these challenges of exclusion are complex, and reflect a variety of socio-economic conditions. In response, IMC employs a multi-disciplinary approach, applying innovative solutions to address these challenges.

We work in partnership with the private, public and third sector to pilot, test and scale solutions which reflects the needs of each community; supporting them to access economic opportunities and basic utilities and develop strategies for improving their livelihood.

Using a multi-disciplinary approach, IMC analyses the needs of the community and designs solutions that reflect their individual circumstances. Specifically, our approach includes:

  • Applying a creative and adaptive approach to programme design and project management. We are flexible in how we help our clients and beneficiaries achieve their outcomes, applying the relevant socio and economic methodologies for each community. Using a participatory approach, we work closely with beneficiaries to assess their needs and co-create solutions.
  • Piloting and testing innovation. We define Innovation as the development of a new idea; the application of a more effective product, service and/or process; or the transfer of an existing solution to a new market or territory. This ranges from high-tech to low/no-tech solutions. Throughout the process we provide technical assistance to stakeholders in the public and private sector, ensuring they remain focused on addressing the needs of marginalised communities.
  • Generating and sharing knowledge with communities, donors and practitioners about successes and lessons learnt during the implementation inclusive growth programmes. We embed and implement a robust monitoring and evaluation framework within our programmes. This generates quantitative and qualitative data to inform future programme design and dissemination of knowledge to the wider development community.
  • Working in partnership with public, private and third sector stakeholders to develop a collaborative approach to the design and implementation of inclusive growth programmes.

Services

  • designing and developing innovation prizes to induce the development of basic utilities for low-income households
  • designing and managing innovative finance mechanisms for all stages of entrepreneurship and business growth cycle
  • undertaking analysis and value chains development to strengthen business and livelihoods, particularly in rural economies
  • undertaking entrepreneurship ecosystems diagnostic and supporting the development of an enabling environment to entrepreneurs
  • provision of training and bespoke technical assistance to entrepreneurs at the ideation, pilot and testing, validation implementation and growth stages of business development
  • development of practical toolkits to support the implementation of services designed to improve the lives of poor
  • primary and secondary research designed to build the evidence based for inclusive growth activities and to advise donors and practitioners on programme and policy design
  • undertaking detailed assessments to determine, and subsequently address programme beneficiaries needs.
  • innovation
  • due diligence / Grant/Fund management
  • evaluation and dissemination of lessons learnt
  • knowledge management
  • development of case studies and knowledge products

Recent projects

Global: Development of CSI Toolkit in support of the Sustainable Agriculture and Farmer Livelihoods Programme, Private Client

Farmers who grow tobacco perceive the crop as an important component of their livelihoods helping them to achieve food, income and financial security for themselves and their families. To this end, a Private Client has engaged consultants at IMC Worldwide to develop a livelihoods programming toolkit, based on existing best practice, that can be adopted and applied to their livelihoods programming across the business in order to (i) better understand the livelihood issues being faced by farming households and communities, (ii) identify appropriate activities that could support more sustainable farming livelihood strategies, and (iii) disaggregate and target initiatives more effectively.

Nepal: Rural Access Programme (RAP), DfID

IMC designed and delivered the DFID financed Nepal Rural Access Programme (RAP) to increase access to market and social services for the rural poor and disadvantaged for the last 14 years through the RAP 1 and 2 programmes. Together these components have created more than 12 million days of employment (40% for women), provided over 2 million people with better access to markets, health and education facilities, and trained more than 30,000 people in new income generating skills and built 980 km of roads. The RAP model was scaled up to a third phase, adding bridges and maintenance components to the original design to support short-term job creation and market led economic development.

Global: Ideas to Impact, DfID

IMC is leading the implementation of DfID’s global 5-year Innovation Prizes programme working in collaboration with Innocentive, GVEP, ITAD and IDS. The programme is launching a variety of innovation prizes designed to stimulate and incentivise research to develop and deploy technologies for low-income consumers that will improve poor people’s access to affordable clean energy, safe drinking water and resilience to climate change. In so doing, it will incentivise the involvement of the private sector and promote innovation that directly benefits low-income households.

South Asia, Africa: Connect to grow, DfID

Connect to Grow is a three year, £3.1m component with the purpose of brokering partnerships and implementing scalable pilot projects between Indian and developing country enterprises, to diffuse innovation in the Agri-Food and Health Sectors. The end goal is that of the pilot projects which are implemented, will result in scalable proofs of concept. This programme is the first of its kind, testing the potential for south-south transfer through cross-country partnerships.

IMC will develop a matchmaking platform, whereby established enterprises in India and enterprises in South Asia and Africa connect and access bespoke financial and technical assistance to support the creation of the partnership and implementation of the pilot venture. IMC will design, implement and manage this matchmaking platform-competitive grant fund hybrid, along with our core team of partners.

Caribbean: Accelerate Caribbean, World Bank, InfoDev

Accelerate Caribbean is a component of infoDev’s Entrepreneurship Program for Innovation in the Caribbean (EPIC). Accelerate Caribbean aims to increase capacity and performance of Caribbean business enablers to provide value added services for early-stage innovation-driven entrepreneurs. IMC and partners will support enablers via coaching, mentoring, action learning, awareness raising, and sharing knowledge on traditional and new models of business incubation and facilitating networking. The target beneficiaries of the project are business incubators, accelerators, innovation centres and hubs, government schemes, private sector innovation challenges, and others, referred to as “business enablers” opportunities.

Urban infrastructure