Designing good technical assistance (TA) starts with a deceptively simple question: what does this company actually need? Getting to a real answer takes more than a checklist and more than a conversation. It takes time in the field, and a willingness to revisit assumptions as the work unfolds.
TA is often treated as a generic add-on to grant funding, a line item rather than the distinct piece of work it actually is. In the Innovations Against Poverty (IAP) programme, TA is practical advisory support, hands-on work alongside companies to solve real business problems, strengthen their inclusive business model, and support their growth. A stronger business is a more investable one.
This post focuses on how IAP designs TA, what implementation is teaching us, and why this matters for the inclusive businesses the programme supports.
Starting with a shared picture of company needs
The first step is a structured self-assessment. Each grantee reflects on its business model, governance, financial systems, inclusion approach, and readiness for future investment, supported by simple self-assessment tools covering each of these areas. Companies are encouraged to involve both leadership and operational staff, so that the strategic view and the day-to-day reality are captured together. The assessment gives companies a structured way to think through their own gaps, and is a starting point for the conversations that follow with the IAP team.
The IAP team then reviews the assessment, and together with the company builds an initial TA plan. It sets out the priorities agreed on at the outset and shapes the early advisory support. This plan is not treated as fixed. It is a working hypothesis, accurate enough to begin with, but expected to evolve as TA needs become clearer and change over time.
Real needs become visible in practice
Once implementation starts, the picture sharpens. Site visits, work alongside teams, and implementation reviews bring new things into view. Some gaps surface as implementation gets underway, with priorities looking different in practice than they did on paper. Others come to light only once the company and the IAP team are working closely together.
Governance is the clearest example. Only a handful of companies flagged it in their initial self-assessments, yet working alongside teams showed that most would benefit from support strengthening internal controls, role clarity, and documentation. Impact assessment and M&E followed a similar pattern, barely surfacing at the outset but emerging as a common gap once data systems were tested in practice. Marketing and innovation priorities were broadly confirmed, but field work sharpened them into specific needs around pricing, distribution, and customer insight.
As these things come into view, TA plans are updated. New needs are added, some original priorities are reframed, and others are sequenced differently. Real needs become visible through close, field-grounded engagement, and good TA design has to be set up to absorb what that engagement reveals.
Three streams of support, matched to what each company needs
Rather than offering a fixed package of services, IAP delivers advisory support through three streams.
SNV provides the foundational advisory support to all companies through IAP staff time. Bopinc, IAP’s partner, delivers advisory on inclusive innovation and marketing to a targeted group of companies. Local Business Development Service (BDS) providers are brought in where specialist technical, organisational, or compliance support is needed.
The right mix for each company is set through its TA plan, shaped around its needs. Most support is tailored to the individual company, because business models and contexts differ widely. IAP also runs group sessions on topics that apply to many companies at once, such as financial management, HR or governance.
What this is teaching us
Four observations stand out from the first year of implementation.
- Trust is the condition for honest diagnosis. The self-assessment happens before contracting, when companies are still being assessed and have little incentive to draw attention to their own gaps. Once a working relationship is in place, the conversations become more candid, and gaps that had stayed below the surface come into view. That takes time, and it works better when advisory is positioned as partnership rather than one-off support.
- Keep the TA flexible: the first plan is not the final one. Because real needs surface as companies move through implementation, the support has to be able to adapt: adding new priorities, reframing others, and resequencing as the picture changes. Building that flexibility in from the outset is what allows TA to stay relevant as a company grows.
- TA builds confidence, not just capability. Companies have grown not only in what they do, but in how they make decisions and engage with investors. This dimension is hard to capture in milestone reports, but it shows up clearly in conversations with company leadership. As one company put it, IAP support gave them the courage and confidence to develop and launch a new product.
- Foundations first: governance and systems shape what comes next. Even technically strong companies tend to absorb advisory more slowly when governance, role clarity, and internal documentation are still being built. Working on those foundations early is often what allows the more specialist support that follows to take hold.
What good TA design is built for
What TA does for a company tends to show up only later, once the grant has ended and the company is on its own. Ingrid van Ginkel, General Manager of HUSK in Cambodia, put it this way:
“As a very small company, you don’t have money to hire the most experienced people. IAP really guided us, helping us build a company properly. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have made it.”
That is the kind of outcome IAP is designing for. Getting there means staying close to companies as they grow and shaping TA around the needs that come to light along the way.