Social facilitation
Consultations that do not vanish after the meeting: named counterparts, traditional authorities, commitments with owners.
Chibase Consulting
Social licence for infrastructure that has to move.
Chibase Consulting is a social facilitation and advisory practice. We help infrastructure, mining, energy, and public-sector programmes in South Africa and the Global South earn and keep a Social Licence to Build — through community participation, MEL, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and a desk you can audit.
Three ways we work
MEL & evidence
Monitoring that cites the trail — grievances, engagements, promises — not a reconstructed month-end pack.
IKS in the mainstream
Indigenous Knowledge Systems as method for participation and M&E, not a courtesy paragraph in the ESIA.
The desk we built
TrustLedger is Chibase’s SRM software: grievance desk, stakeholder registry, engagements, commitments, and evidence packs. Consulting is people and method. The product is the trail those people keep.
Short notes
Practice
Social facilitation is broken — and box-checking is why
When engagement is a compliance event, communities learn that talking changes nothing. The fix is a trail: who was heard, what was promised, what closed.
ReadRisk
The cockroach theory: local structures adapt faster than your organogram
Host communities reorganise around a project whether you map them or not. Ignore customary and ward structures and you will meet them at the gate.
Read