At Montrose, we believe that efficiency, success and sustainability in social performance programming comes with deep local contextual understanding, respect for local context and culture, appropriateness of personnel and methods, and an ability to integrate whilst maintaining international ethical and investment standards. Social licence must be earned, and imposition of foreign methods without consultation and negotiation is a recipe for lost time and money in dealing with problems later. Montrose ensures, through our programming’s high quality local content, that problems are solved before they occur, risk is reduced through local appropriateness, and value is added from the bottom up.
We achieve this through a range of proven, though innovative, methods:
- Our corporate and project offices are situated in the developing countries and contexts in which we work rather than Western capital cities, allowing less rent and flights cost passed onto clients, and appreciation of the challenges that our clients face in operating in such contexts, right up to our corporate level.
- Our senior management have all lived and worked in developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Pacific for much of their lives, and have deep understanding and appreciation of these contexts.
- Ground-level experience and language ability is prioritised in our recruitment of core staff and international consultants. Within Montrose core staff we have native and proficient speakers of English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Burmese, Kiswahili, Luganda, and Tok Pisin. We strive to operate in the preferred language of our clients and partners, and believe language is essential to local understanding and efficient business.
- Wherever possible, national or regional consultants are sourced for project work, maximising local understanding and access to networks, and saving costs of flights and accommodation that in other firms are passed onto the client.
As well as ensuring local content is prominent in our own work, we also use the above methods to advise our clients on the best way to maximise local content in their operations.
Click here for examples of our projects where local content is prominent or alternatively click here to view all projects.
