Who we are
IMACON Consulting Group is a community of experienced experts and consultants working in organisational development and capacity building, project and programme planning, monitoring and evaluation. Founded in 2010, registered in Poland since 2022, working across Central Asia, the South Caucasus, the Western Balkans, the Middle East and East Africa.
How we started
IMACON was founded in 2010 by Sergei Gotin and Uladzislau Vialichka — two consultants who, by that point, already had ten years of independent practice in project design, evaluation and capacity building behind them. The original goal was to coordinate work that already existed across an informal network of regional consultants, raise its quality, and let the team take part in larger assignments — for the EU, the UN and bilateral donors — that were beyond the reach of any single consultant.
How we evolved
By 2021 the IMACON community had grown to about fifteen experts across thematic specialisations. After 2020 key experts relocated, and in 2022 IMACON established a Polish legal entity and rebuilt its operating base in Poland. Today the registered firm operates as Sergei Gotin JDG, with a core team of two co-founders and two senior partners and a wider network of trusted consultants engaged on a project basis.
How we work
Our experts have more than twenty years of cumulative experience in monitoring and evaluation for international donors: the European Union (including ROM), UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, UNIDO, USAID, EBRD and IFC, as well as bilateral programmes funded by Polska Pomoc, Sida, DANIDA and BMZ.
Three areas of consultancy — project and programme evaluation; organisational development and strategic planning; project design and management — are complemented by a line of standardised applied-research services for clients who need research outputs on short timelines. IMACON experts combine Western methodologies with long experience of adjusting them to the local context of countries in transition, and have developed their own methodological tools for organisational development, project appraisal and evaluation.
What makes us different
Most evaluators specialise narrowly. IMACON deliberately crosses thematic and sectoral boundaries — adapting business strategies developed in a UNIDO industrial project in Kyrgyzstan for a Caritas programme in Albania, or applying organisational-development frameworks built for civil society to UN environmental work.
We use AI tools ethically and locally: language models run on our own infrastructure, so that client data never leaves it during transcription and qualitative coding, and the interpretation of evidence is never delegated to a machine.
Our experience with faith-based and inter-confessional organisations — Christian, Jewish and Muslim — is rare in the development-consulting market. It builds on the managing partner’s earlier role coordinating programmes of the World Council of Churches.
What we are looking for
We actively seek collaboration with organisations that implement development projects, and offer our experience primarily to initiatives at the intersection of policy, civil society and economic development. We look for opportunities to join partner projects that require the formation of consortia or strategic partnerships, and hold a special interest in assignments that strengthen our regional portfolio in Asia, Africa and the Western Balkans.