Decentralized Economic Growth
Some of our recent experience includes:
- Afghanistan Alternative Development Program – North/West (ADP N/W)
- Cimientos – Colombia
- Competitive Armenian Private Sector Project (CAPS)
- Lebanon Municipal Capacity Building (TAMKIN)
JAA is committed to facilitating market-driven economic development based on the drivers of economic growth and competitiveness. JAA has developed approaches for local economic development that take the perspective that fostering economic growth is highly effective when decentralized to allow individual business owners, farmers, local government, and citizens to partake in the development and implementation of specific, place-based economic strategies. Fostering ownership through business principles, market realities, public-private dialogue and collaborative implementation ensures that every stakeholder is working towards improving the drivers of competitiveness and the enabling environment through a cohesive strategy. This perspective, one that mixes a market-driven economic process and decentralized decision-making with the traditional local economic development methodology, is what JAA calls decentralized economic growth.
JAA’s approach initially makes use of regional and sectoral leadership mapping tools, to ensure that all key players identified and brought to the table early on. Encouraging participation ensures that the strategy development and implementation will benefit the entire community – not only specific economic players. Getting all of the stakeholders on board early on also helps to create an atmosphere that is open to implementing the changes needed in the local enabling environment to provide the support and local services necessary for success. This combination of targeted economic drivers, sound business models, investment focus, and ownership and cooperation amongst the stakeholders in the local economy allows a community to effectively and efficiently reach towards its economic potential.
JAA, through hundreds of competitiveness, enterprise development and investment programs over the past 20 years, has developed deep sectoral expertise; we have worked closely with over 40 industries worldwide and many more subsectors. These programs have nearly all required looking at sectors from both a national and a local perspective. JAA’s extensive work with supply and value chain development has enabled communities to understand the role that they play in fostering and supporting thriving linkages with domestic and international markets, and local value addition. JAA has expertise linking industries ranging from handicrafts and agriculture to ICT and high-tech manufacturing to international and domestic markets. Also, JAA is both committed and equipped to provide unique, community-driven solutions to each locality we work with.
JAA also adds value to decentralized economic development through its unique approaches for supporting cities and regions with economic planning and strategic implementation of those plans, and with local entrepreneurship and enterprise development. JAA brings a proven toolkit of methodologies, developed in-house, which it applies and adapts to each locality’s situation. These include strategies for engaging secondary cities that are competing with a primary metropolitan area (as is common in developing economies), approaches to generating multiple streams of income for localities that are highly dependent upon one or a few sectors for their entire livelihood, cost-sharing grant-funded initiatives for long-term sustainability, and the “10 Bridges” approach which links the workforce needs of the private sector for improving the drivers of competitiveness with university curricula.