Dorsch Impact supports the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH in this programme since November 2021. Together with our Project Manager Esther Greco-Welle and Cédric Kotitschke, Head of our Governance and Economic Development Department, our visitors had one intense working day in the Kronberg Office and the Dorsch Global premisses at Frankfurt Airport. The visit was a welcome opportunity to strengthen the connection between our head office team and the people leading our work on the ground.
Learning from the Field: A Visit from Benin
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In the first days of June our colleagues from the Kronberg office welcomed Nestor Ahouangan, Team Leader, and Riphath Dossou, Key Expert and Expert Pool Manager, from the ReFORME project in Benin.
The time was used for a structured presentation of the project, a joint lessons-learned session, and what the team called “reversed backstopping” – a format in which field experts bring their knowledge and experience directly into the conversation with the headquarters, rather than the other way around. Other colleagues joined the presentation remotely, making it a genuinely shared exchange.
Both experts are actually no strangers to Dorsch Impact: Key Expert Riphath Dossou has previously collaborated with our team on the GIZ predecessor project PDDC (2017–2020), making this a reunion as much as a working meeting. And Nestor Ahouangan was the GIZ Component Leader for PDDC and thus collaborated with Dorsch Impact predecessor AMBERO* at the time.
The visit left the team with two concrete outcomes: a shared understanding of what genuinely works in the Beninese project context and therefore valuable input for future similar engagements, and a noticeably stronger team culture, with the distance between "HQ" and "field" feeling considerably smaller.
The atmosphere throughout was positive and grounded. After a long period of remote collaboration, putting faces to names and seeing where the other team actually works made a real difference.
The evening ended at Apfelwein Wagner, a Frankfurt institution, and the final morning brought something quintessentially seasonal: strawberry picking on a field in Oberursel, with colleagues, children in tow, making the most of an early summer tradition.
Two days. Good work. And a stronger team for it.
*Dorsch Impact is the result of a merger of the three companies AMBERO Consulting GmbH, AHT GROUP GmbH, and Dorsch International Consultants GmbH. Learn more
About ReFORME:
Short for Réforme des Finances Publiques pour l'Atteinte des ODD et le Renforcement de la Mobilisation des Recettes de l'État the project supports public financial governance reform in Benin. Commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the European Union, and implemented in technical cooperation with GIZ, the project has been running since 2021. Dorsch Impact's role focuses on SDG mainstreaming across all project components and the management of a short-term expert pool. By the end of the first project phase, 50 of Benin's 77 communes were reporting annually on key SDG indicators through a dedicated national digital platform – a tangible step towards transparent, data-driven public finance.
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