How an NGO in Madagascar built an organization that scales

A visit to Onja in Madagascar revealed a pattern that shows up in every scaling company. Raw energy without structure dissipates. With a clear framework, it compounds.

The moment I stepped off the street

Toamasina is a working port city. Like a lot of cities in developing countries, it moves on improvisation — loud, hustling, bustling and high energy. Roads longing for repair. Connectivity that comes and goes.

I visited in fall 2025 as an enterprise advisor to Onja, a software engineering organization that had cold-emailed our startup Tribaldata years earlier. Somehow, the thread stayed alive. And now I was there in person.

The moment you walk through Onja’s gates, something shifts.

It’s not dramatic, no grand entrance. But the campus is calm in a way the street outside is not. There’s reliable power. There’s high-speed internet. There’s a sense of intentionality in the space — the kind you recognize when someone has thought carefully about what they’re building, and built it on purpose.

That contrast stayed with me. It clarified something I’d been circling for a long time.

A model that compounds

Onja’s model is worth understanding before drawing any conclusions from it.

Students from underprivileged backgrounds sign a commitment with Onja. The first two and a half years are funded training: English first, then software engineering. A full, sustained investment in what the person actually needs to participate in the global economy. The organization covers their costs so they can study without needing to choose between learning and making ends meet.

The remaining years are paid work, structured as three two-year contracts. Remote projects, real clients, real software engineering. The income generated during those years flows back to fund the next cohort of students. Quiet genius in its simplicity.

A system that sustains itself and grows

After the six years, the path doesn’t just end. The senior people either stay and continue to mentor the next generation of students, or they leave to start something of their own, hiring and training local talent in turn.

The system doesn’t just sustain itself. It propagates and multiplies.

And there’s another dimension: expats and advisors like me who show up with genuine goodwill and a desire to do something useful. That energy, without structure, tends to dissipate - leading to people feeling good about helping a NGO and leave without much having changed. Onja was different and intentional. Onja gave that energy somewhere to go. The framework converted good intention into direction and momentum.

That is harder to design than it sounds.

Goodwill alone doesn’t create progress

I’ve worked with a lot of organizations over the years. Growing startups, consultancies, enterprise teams mid-transformation. And the pattern I saw in Onja is the same pattern I have seen everywhere.

Motivated people are common. Talented people are common too. People who genuinely want to do well, build something meaningful, grow in their craft — they exist in most places I’ve worked.

What’s rarer is the framework that lets that energy compound rather than scatter.

When everything runs on urgency

Clients I work with fall into this trap far too often. They genuinely care about customers, they respond, they deliver. But the mode they operate in is permanent urgency. Objectives shift weekly, sometimes daily. Every week is all hands on deck for something new.

The people are capable. The intentions are good. But the energy doesn’t accumulate. It resets, again and again.

I’ve seen the same thing at companies at much later stages. Everyone is trying hard. Nobody quite knows what they’re building toward. Progress gets made and then re-made. The same problems resurface six months later wearing slightly different clothes.

This is not a motivation problem. It’s a structural one.

The framework that made the difference

Back in 2012 I started at DMI and ended up running delivery. We were a mess in the way that fast-growing service businesses often are: reactive, chaotic, held together by a few people who knew how everything worked and couldn’t afford to take a week off.

In the beginning, I had to sit in on every single client meeting. Not because I didn’t trust the team, but because the system didn’t yet give them what they needed to act on their own. Building that took years. But I remember the first time I pulled back with confidence. The meeting happened. The client was looked after. I wasn’t needed.

Years later, one of the team members asked me for a writeup of the tools and processes we’d developed together. He went on to specialize in resource planning, speaking at conferences, advising other teams. The system we built became his platform.

Understanding what that system should look like is one thing. Getting an organization that’s been running on urgency for years to actually adopt it — that’s where most of the work lives, and the hard discussions that needed to take place.

Structure is what gives momentum a direction

There’s a belief, common in fast-moving companies, that process is what slows you down. That structure and speed are in tension. That the framework can wait until things settle down.

Don’t wait for things to settle down on their own. They rarely do.

What I observed at Onja, and what I’ve seen work in the places I’ve been part of, is that structure isn’t the antithesis of forward motion. It’s what gives individual initiative and forward motion a direction.

Without it, energy is real but it dissipates. People work hard, care deeply, want to grow, and still end up in the same place a year later, wondering why progress feels so incremental. Activity is mistaken for productivity. It can be very frustrating, especially for the passionates, that tend to leave when the hard work doesn’t translate into forward motion.

With the right framework, the same energy compounds. Each person who grows creates capacity for the next one. Each year builds on the previous. The organization gets more capable over time, not just busier.

Onja made this visible to me in a very simple and elegant way, partly because the stakes were so different, and partly because the design was so clean. A city outside operating on improvisation. A campus inside where human potential had a structure to grow through.

What stayed with me

Think back to that cold email. Someone at Onja, trained in English, commercially aware, embedded in an organization that had deliberately built all of those things, reached out to our startup in Europe to sell remote software engineering services. The email landed. The thread stayed alive. Years later I was on a plane to Madagascar.

That email wasn’t an accident. It was a symptom of a system that worked end to end.

Knowing isn’t the hard part. Doing it is.

Many companies I’ve worked with rely on a few key people holding everything together through sheer will. Everyone knows who they are. The system quietly depends on them. That works, until it doesn’t. Most founders already know what good looks like. Finding the time to build it is the harder problem.

If that sounds familiar, it’s worth asking: what would it look like if the system carried more of that load, so your best people could spend their energy on the work that actually needs them?

Did this resonate? Always happy to swap notes with founders and operators who are thinking about this — it’s a subject I genuinely enjoy.