This past winter, our MAP team traveled to Monrovia, Liberia, to partner with TRIBE, a bold and visionary organization that’s tackling the country’s youth unemployment crisis head on. Their secret weapon? Higher-order skills — critical thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving — that bridge the gap between learning and earning. TRIBE works at the intersection of education and workforce development, preparing young Liberians not just to get jobs, but to create them.

Our job was to support TRIBE’s five-year strategy by diving deep into its social impact consulting and learning solutions portfolios. That meant diagnosing operational bottlenecks, streamlining business development processes, and helping shape a roadmap for how TRIBE could scale its Re-Novate Academy, an innovative program that brings real-world problem solving into the classroom. 

Our team leveraged our past experiences across multiple industries (consulting, construction, finance, and marketing) as well as core strategy frameworks learned in core curriculum classes (thanks, Strategy 502!) to develop our targeted approach. We had a ton to learn and only seven weeks to get it done.

We hosted stakeholder interviews with government ministries, brainstormed ways to improve TRIBE’s storytelling and digital presence, and built proposal playbooks to help them win future consulting bids.

But this project wasn’t just about strategy decks and impact metrics. It was about people. It was about our CEO client, Wainright Acquoi, who’d built TRIBE from a WhatsApp group into a national force. It was about the young facilitators we met who were using TRIBE’s training to teach, lead, and inspire high schoolers to start their own ventures (and they had some great ideas and were even looking for seed investors when we sat in on one of their Re-Novate after-school sessions). And it was about realizing that sustainable development doesn’t happen in silos — it happens when mission, community, and execution come together.

What did we learn? That being “consultants” sometimes means being students first. That listening deeply can be more powerful than having answers. And that even small teams can help shape big futures. And yes, we also managed to sample every Liberian food we could find (pro tip: sweet potato greens are amazing and Liberians will tell you they have the best Jollof rice in all of West Africa, and they might be right!)

So, here’s to TRIBE, and to all the changemakers working across Liberia. We’re grateful to have played a small part in your big story. To learn more about TRIBE and their upcoming projects, check out their website.