About ETC

Organisation

Over 75 professionals work together at the Netherlands based ETC office.

In the Netherlands ETC is composed of two separate juridical entities: ETC Foundation and ETC Nederland BV. These entities have separate administrative and financial reporting structures.

• ETC Foundation hosts the subsidised activities of the Netherlands office (Leusden).
• ETC Nederland B.V. is the organisation that carries out the activities of the Netherlands office acquired in competition. The BV is an independent body that reports directly to the management and has its own annual statement of accounts. The BV does not have a profit target, but supports the building up of necessary reserves. ETC Foundation is the owner of the BV.

ETC Foundation is member of the ETC International Group, a network of professional organisations with offices in four countries.

Mission & Approach

For ETC modern international development cooperation means working in innovative ways on our themes in both the South and North. We work as equal international partners on local solutions. We put people’s own culture, knowledge and learning first, so they can take responsibility for their own future. We call this ‘civic driven change’.

ETC devotes about half of its resources to support change through capacity development in civil society, governmental institutions and the private sector. This way ETC is supporting a country’s own development of food security, water and energy supply, health care and education. Partners are responsible for direct poverty alleviation. Our involvement in this is limited to projects aimed at innovation and learning. Capacity development and policy influencing often takes place within international collaborative networks, where all participants learn from each other's experiences.

Partners

ETC is working with hundreds of partners in 75 countries on all continents.

In its work ETC puts the emphasis on either sustainable development, poverty reduction or rehabilitation. This differs in different regions. To illustrate this diversity: in India we support farmers to find an alternative in organic cotton growth, in Kenya we advice health management at district level and in The Netherlands we support rural renewal by promoting innovation and local participation.

Themes

The activities of ETC include a variety of themes, like health, endogenous development, energy and gender, energy and poverty, climate change, natural resource management, sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, urban agriculture and food security, rural development.

In these themes, or fields of expertise, ETC has a range of approaches or ‘products & services’: management of global resource centres, incubation of global networks, formulating programmes and policy, evaluation of organisations, networks and policies, research type of studies, training and capacity building, contributing to policy dialogue and institutional change.

Programmes / Network Organisations

ETC is the host organisation of quite a few national and global programmes, which are extensive network organisations in most cases with partners in several continents. Some of these networks are initiated by ETC. In the past, ETC has been incubator of ILEIA (Information Centre for Low External input Agriculture) and of AME Foundation (promoting ecological agriculture in India).

Our consultants deploy their broad international experience by advising local organisations and governments in short-term assignments.

For more information on fields of expertise and services we refer to the individual pages of ETC units, portfolio and associated offices.

Quality Management

ETC adheres to the principles of the code for proper management of charities (Code Goed Bestuur voor Goede Doelen, Wijffels Commission) and the quality standards of Partos, the Dutch sector organization for international cooperation.

The management of our main working processes, policy and implementation, financial and administrative processes is arranged through ETC’s Quality Management System, which is ISO9001:2000 certified.