AccordCompass Advisory is a strategic communications and stakeholder engagement consultancy for the public and development sector — helping institutions and financed projects earn understanding, alignment and trust across East Africa. Since 2013.
Each service stands alone; they compound when run together. Select any card for the full scope.
Institution-wide and project-level communication strategies built on evidence, not instinct: situation analysis, audience segmentation and messaging frameworks; channel planning that reflects how your publics get information; protocol and spokesperson guidance; and annual communication plans with objectives you can measure. For leadership, we provide standing advisory support on positioning and on the communications no one wants to get wrong — sensitive announcements, controversy and reform.
Stakeholder Engagement Plans compliant with World Bank ESS10, IFC Performance Standards and comparable frameworks — written to be implemented, not filed. We handle stakeholder identification and mapping, influence–interest analysis, engagement calendars, disclosure planning and the documentation systems that make it all auditable. Then we stay: supporting implementation across the project lifecycle, updating the plan as the project and its stakeholders change.
We design and facilitate public and community consultations that people can attend, understand and speak at — multilingual outreach, deliberate inclusion of vulnerable and hard-to-reach groups, and feedback registers that prove what was said. And we build Grievance Redress Mechanisms that work as systems, not suggestion boxes: intake channels people already use, case management, escalation pathways, and resolution tracking with reporting your financiers will accept.
Donor- and IFI-financed projects carry communication obligations most teams discover late. We run the whole component: visibility and branding compliance under each financier’s rules, milestone and results communication, beneficiary information materials, and site-level information for the communities living next to the works. Everything is produced to the standard that supervision missions and audits expect — documented, dated and defensible.
Multi-party programs fail quietly in the gaps between institutions. We keep the structure: correspondence management across government, financiers and implementing agencies; meeting and mission coordination; agreed minutes and decision records that everyone signs; and escalation support when a decision stalls. The result is a documented trail across the whole program — so accountability is traceable and no commitment evaporates between meetings.
Practical training for ministry communication units and project implementation units (PIUs) — built around the work they already have on their desks. Engagement and facilitation skills, communication planning, GRM operation, disclosure practice: taught through real cases, then reinforced through mentoring that transfers capability instead of creating dependence on us. Success, for this service, is measured by how little you need us afterwards.
Public information and behavior-change campaigns for reforms, programs and services — from campaign strategy and creative concepts to materials in the languages people speak, disseminated at community level through channels communities trust. We monitor reach and comprehension, because a message that arrived but was not understood is a cost, not a result.
The evidence layer under everything else: stakeholder analysis, perception and awareness surveys, focus groups, and communication audits of what your institution is saying and how it lands. Baseline and endline studies measure whether engagement changed understanding and trust — so you know the difference between activity and effect, and can show it to a board, a minister or a mission.
Our method since 2013: four movements, one continuous course. Every engagement — whatever its size — runs on the same instrument.
Listen before anything. We establish where the project actually is — not where its documents say it is: stakeholder identification and mapping, perception baselines, situation and risk analysis, and an honest reading of history.
Turn listening into a plan. Strategy is written against the evidence from Orient: messaging frameworks, SEPs and disclosure plans, engagement calendars, GRM design — with measurable objectives and a documentation system underneath.
Do the work, in public. Consultations, campaigns, liaison, grievance operation, day-to-day counsel — implemented with discipline and recorded as we go, so every commitment has a paper trail behind it.
Measure, correct, transfer. Endline and perception studies test whether understanding and trust moved. We correct course, report to the standard financiers expect, and transfer capability so the practice survives our exit.
The stakes change by sector; the craft of alignment does not.
Service reforms, facility programs and public-health campaigns that live or die on community confidence.
Corridors, ports and roads — where engagement with affected communities decides the schedule.
Generation, transmission and adaptation programs — explained before the pylons arrive.
Institutional reforms and public bodies earning visible, verifiable trust.
Utilities, sanitation and urban upgrading — services people feel daily and judge instantly.
School systems, safety nets and skills programs reaching the households they exist for.
Engagement across federal and member-state institutions, and the financed operations rebuilding systems and services — grounded in fluency with the country’s institutional landscape.
Kenya is the region’s hub for financiers and implementing partners — we work within that institutional ecosystem, and well beyond it, where programs land.
Deployments across the wider region for programs that cross borders: trade corridors, energy interconnection, basin management, regional health.
Positions we hold, from thirteen years of practice. Short reads, no jargon.
A PDF on a project website satisfies a checklist; it does not inform a community. Disclosure owes people comprehension: the right language, the right format, the right moment — before positions harden, not after. The test is never “was it published?” It is “who understood it — and how do we know?”
Most projects treat the GRM as a compliance appendix. Communities treat it as a test: does raising a problem change anything? Every case resolved and visibly closed is a deposit of credibility; every case lost in a spreadsheet is a withdrawal. Run the register as if it decides your license to operate — because socially, it does.
Engagement that stops at English stops at the ministry gate. A single project here can cross four languages before it reaches its beneficiaries — and every translation is a chance to be misunderstood at scale. Budget for language the way you budget for cement: as a structural material, not a finishing touch.
Seven honest statements. Answer as things are — not as the last report described them. Nothing is recorded; this runs entirely on this page.
We can name our ten most influential stakeholders — and each one’s current position.
Our stakeholder engagement plan has been updated since the project last changed.
A community member can raise a grievance through a channel they already use.
We know what beneficiaries actually understand about the project — not just what we told them.
Every consultation we have held is documented well enough to survive an audit.
Our spokespeople would all give the same answer to “what is this project for?”
Bad news reaches project leadership before it reaches the press.
Answer all seven statements to take a reading of your project’s engagement health.
Since 2013, AccordCompass Advisory has been closing the distance between institutions and the people they serve.
We are a strategic communications and stakeholder engagement consultancy for the public and development sector — operating from Somalia and Kenya, serving the wider East African region. We work for government ministries, public institutions, development organizations and projects financed by the World Bank, UN agencies, the African Development Bank and similar institutions.
Thirteen years of consultations, campaigns, grievance systems and program communications — through election cycles, droughts, reforms and full program lifecycles — taught us one thing above all: trust is earned in process, not in press releases. Our method, The Bearing, turns that lesson into a repeatable discipline.
What you can evaluate is how we work: the rigor of our method, the thinking on this page, and the way we run a first conversation.
We report what communities actually said — especially when it is not what the project hoped to hear.
Every engagement documented to survive an audit; every claim traceable to a source.
We work where the project lands — in its region, its languages, its institutions.
Advice shaped by evidence, never by the prospect of the next contract.
With a conversation, then a short diagnostic. We scope the situation, propose a clear set of deliverables and a timeline, and agree terms before work starts. For urgent situations — a stalled consultation, a grievance backlog, a supervision mission on the calendar — we can mobilize a focused intervention quickly.
Yes. We design against World Bank ESS10, IFC Performance Standards and comparable frameworks, alongside national requirements — and we build the documentation trail that makes compliance demonstrable, not just claimed.
Yes. We operate from Somalia and Kenya and take regional deployments across East Africa, particularly for cross-border programs — corridors, interconnectors, basin management and regional health programs. Feasibility is assessed engagement by engagement.
Gladly. We fit naturally as the stakeholder engagement and communications component of larger technical teams. Send the terms of reference and your deadline to info@accordcompass.com and we will respond with a capability statement.
Somali, Kiswahili, English and Arabic. Materials are developed in the languages your stakeholders use — not translated as an afterthought — and other languages of the region can be covered through local partners.
Time-based or deliverable-based, agreed transparently up front, with fee structures compatible with public procurement and donor rules. You will always know what a deliverable costs before we start it.
AccordCompass grows by finding people who can hold a room in a district hall, draft for a minister, and document both to audit standard. If that sounds like you, introduce yourself — in any of our working languages.
Tell us where your project stands — we will come back with a view, not a brochure.
info@accordcompass.com