ECO Consult provides consulting services for sustainable development. Together with our partners we develop consensual work plans and contribute our professional experience to implement solutions in a holistic and sustainable way.
Our work helps partner countries of international cooperation to manage social and political transformation processes such as democratisation, governance, legal and administrative reform by way of practical knowledge transfer. ECO Consult helps implement international agreements on the ground; we contribute to 12 of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals and work in accordance with the Paris Declaration. In cooperation with companies, village communities and public bodies, we focus on developing integrated, interdisciplinary projects in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America. Our starting points for a broad-based improvement of living conditions are organisational development and education, climate-smart use of natural resources and economic development (products, markets, infrastructure).
As of one of Germany’s leading consultancies in technical cooperation we offer our clients - public donors, civil society and private sector stakeholders - three decades’ expertise in project planning, implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E).
In 1992 ECO Consult started out as a specialist partner for pro-poor forest sector planning and rural development/participatory land use, primarily in West Africa. The start-up’s founding directors were the tropical foresters Cornelia Sepp, M.Sc. Forestry, and Dr. Steve Sepp, Ph.D. Forestry, together with the development sociologist Dietrich Busacker, M.A. Sociology.
In addition to projects and expertise on sustainable, multifunctional forest management and the use of renewable energies, ECO soon expanded its services to the education sector and the crosscutting realm of policy advice. The company continued to grow with global proliferation of climate mitigation/adaptation schemes, governance and introduction of innovative financing instruments.
Currently, the portfolio is being complemented by satellite-based land use inventory and development of mobile digitalised services. Training/strategic competence development was another addition to the stock. Our about 120 technical staff in Germany and abroad, employed permanently or on a temporary basis, are supervised from our Oberaula headquarters.
ECO Consult follows the principles of
In all ECO projects with the transition fields of climate, natural resources, biodiversity, society and value chains, the issue of sustainability has always been discussed and implemented in a solution-oriented manner.
We design our consulting professionally, holistically and in an integrated manner in terms of economic, ecological and social sustainability.
ECO has followed this approach for 30 years, both in project implementation and in the management and organisation of the company itself. ECO is aware of its responsibility towards employees, beneficiaries, partners and clients and presents all guidelines, activities and visions transparently in the ECO Sustainability Report.
ECO Consult operates along EN ISO 9001:2015 standards, which is regularly certified by independent auditing. ECO's quality assurance policy is part of the normative framework for our operative business and of the company's strategic orientation.
Our business activities are designed to offer first class quality to gain our clients' satisfaction at all times. The services we deliver are subjected to a tailor-made M&E system which helps to record and analyse deviations immediately, in the course of the backstopping process. We work innovatively and quickly implement new technical findings and standards.
Business partnerships are established on the basis of mutual fairness and honesty, to ensure long-term stability in business relationships for mutual benefit.
Employees are involved into the business processes to a high degree so they can use their capacities in the best possible way to achieve the company goals defined by the management. The qualification, information and motivation of all employees is a prime prerequisite for ECO Consult's success.