Agora Global: Systemic Change for Inclusive Development
Our Mission: To change the way that systems work to ensure better outcomes for large numbers of disadvantaged people.
Our Story: Frustrated with inequality of opportunity and ineffective aid responses, we coalesced at the Springfield Centre under the guidance of the late Alan Gibson, from whom we take the inspiration for our name. Agora is ancient Greek for 'markets', one in which supply and demand for a range of goods and services meet.
Our Work: We work in three closely related areas - research, training, and consulting, unified by a common approach centred on sustainable development. We work across a wide range of sectors, clients, and geographies.
Consulting: Agora offer a range of consulting services to help funders, programme implementers, and companies to increase their impact from programme design, right through to invention development, strategic reviews and formal evaluations.
Training: We offer a range of training services for funders, implementers and companies covering the entire programme lifecycle. Our training is segmented to help people do their jobs better - for funders to commission, design and manage better programmes. For implementers to design and manage better interventions, for measurement specialists to better understand systemic change, and for companies that want to operate in developing countries and have better development impact in doing so.
Research: Research is our engine. We want development to be done better and for that we have to learn and to disseminate that learning. That includes learning what's not working and, as people tend not to want to pay for that, here's where we invest a lot of our time. Our regular research outputs include the Agora Trumpet - always informed, often provocative; our Working Paper Series where we take a little more time to construct our arguments; and policy inputs where we try to directly influence key development actors.
