Our approach
1
Co-mentoring,
not hierarchy
Ambora builds working relationships grounded in trust, reciprocity and mutual learning. We do not train individuals for certificates; we strengthen teams – and the routines that remain inside the organisation when we leave.
2
Embedded accompaniment
We work alongside teams, where the work actually happens, on real tasks. The focus: turning experience, ideas and needs into practical routines that are locally owned and hold over time.
3
A two-way
interface
Ambora acts as an interface between local organisations and their national and international partners – helping both sides align expectations, clarify priorities and understand each other's realities, without financial intermediation and without political positioning.
Alongside the human accompaniment, a lightweight, privacy-minded digital tool helps teams keep their routines alive between sessions. It supports the relationship at the heart of our approach; it never replaces it.
Who we work with
We support, in particular:
- civil society organisations (associations, local NGOs, community groups),
- local public authorities and institutions closest to their communities,
- cooperatives,
- micro-entities with a social purpose (for example, initiatives led by people in vulnerable situations seeking to strengthen their economic autonomy).
Ambora gives particular attention to organisations that mainstream capacity-strengthening schemes overlook – predominantly those led by women, by young people, or by marginalised communities.
What this changes
The ambition is simple: organisations that are more autonomous, more credible, and more able to sustain what they do. In practice, this may include:
- governance that holds (clear roles, real decisions, accountability that is practiced),
- reliable internal routines (simple processes, basic controls, follow-through),
- the confidence to structure a plan, formulate a request, or approach funding or credit on their own terms,
- teams that hold together – maintaining their routines even when everything around them is unstable.
Our approach is intentionally distinct from generic training – and so is the way we learn. We track evidence of use, not evidence of delivery: whether routines are actually adopted, owned by teams, and still holding months later.
For philantropists
Your contribution supports a lever, not a one-off activity
By supporting Ambora, you invest in the ability of local organisations to endure: to strengthen how they work from within, and to engage with partners and funders on their own terms. This is discreet, practical support – designed to avoid cycles of dependency and repeated “restarts”. We are launching an 18-month pilot to test and refine our approach: six to eight organisations across three to four settings in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia, selected on the basis of their ambitions, potential and needs – not their existing donor relationships.
The co-founders
Between us, we have spent three decades watching the aid sector's standard training model produce activity rather than change - while capable organisations remain invisible to the partners who need them. We have seen enough of what doesn't work to know what needs to change, and enough of what does to know that change is possible. Ambora is our answer.
Alexandre Dormeier-Freire
Alexandre brings thirty years of experience in executive and continuing education for professionals in international cooperation, development, and public administration. He leads executive programmes at a Swiss university institution and serves on several commissions for the Swiss Confederation, the City of Geneva, and international organisations active in development and humanitarian action. His work focuses on how organisations actually learn and change – and how that learning becomes practical, durable, and owned by the teams themselves.
Oliver Jütersonke
Oliver brings two decades of strategic accompaniment, programme design, and organisational learning across some fifty country contexts, at the interface between local organisations, donors, and international agencies in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Alongside this, he has spent over fifteen years teaching, coaching and mentoring mid-career professionals from government and civil society – the very profiles Ambora’s accompaniment now serves. He sits on the quality commissions of two leading Swiss NGO networks – presiding one – and has spent his career translating between the realities on the ground and the expectations of institutional partners.
