The first thing a remote consultancy loses is the room. No reassuring oak table. No ritual exchange of business cards. No quick read of who sits beside the minister and who is quietly ignored. For most firms, this sounds like a handicap. For Baobab Consulting, it became the assignment.
Liz Grossman Kitoyi and Tayib Fall founded Baobab in St. Louis, Senegal, in 2016. The company was remote-first from the beginning, when “remote-first” still sounded like a caveat one offered before explaining that, yes, the work would get done. Its team moved across time zones and cultural contexts because the clients’ problems already did. A development institution in Washington might need to reach an audience in Dakar. A university course in Senegal might need teachers, translators and learners in several places at once. An African organization might have a persuasive case for investment but no useful route into the rooms where capital was allocated.
Baobab’s answer was to treat communications less like packaging and more like plumbing. Research establishes what is true. Strategy decides who must care. Messages make the truth portable. Media, training, events and partnerships carry it to the people who can act. If a pipe is missing, a polished press release merely announces that nothing is flowing.
The firm that started in the middle
Most agencies choose a side. Public-relations firms specialize in attention. Research boutiques specialize in evidence. Management consultancies specialize in recommendations, often delivered in a handsome deck. Baobab sits between them. It sells strategic communications and public relations, social-impact advisory and research, plus intercultural programming and convening. The unifying product is not a document. It is movement - of a narrative, a partnership, a skill or a decision.
The case studies make that model less abstract. In 2021, Open Society Foundations hired Baobab, working with Université Gaston Berger, to convert the traditionally in-person Human Rights and Drug Policies in Africa course into a complete online program. Baobab researched platforms and chose Thinkific. It coordinated 41 recordings, in person and remotely, edited the lectures, added translation for bilingual access and continued to monitor the platform. The published result was more than 300 active learners.
The first thing that failed, in other words, was the assumption that learning required a shared room. Baobab did not simply stream the old format. It rebuilt the delivery chain: platform, recording schedule, editing, translation, operations and evaluation. That sequence is copyable. Start with the barrier, not the software. Select the tool after defining the learners. Budget for the unglamorous middle - scheduling, quality control, translation - and decide who keeps the machine running after launch.
“At Baobab, communications is a tool we use to achieve strategic goals, not the end in itself.”Liz Grossman Kitoyi, co-founder and CEO
A scope of work is a social technology
Baobab’s remote-work account contains a wonderfully unfashionable hero: the scope-of-work document. For a three-day African-diaspora event in California, the firm assembled a five-person team split between the United States and Nigeria. Three people worked on site; two coordinated behind the scenes. WhatsApp, shared documents and virtual meetings helped, but the company identified a detailed scope as the crucial device. It established the who, what, when, where and how before distance could turn a small ambiguity into a transatlantic surprise.
That is the part worth stealing. Distributed work does not remove context; it increases the price of leaving context unspoken. A useful project brief names the audience, decision owner, handoffs, channels, deadlines and definition of done. Then it asks a less common question: which cultural assumptions would be obvious to one teammate and invisible to another?
The International Labour Organization work shows the same instinct in training form. Baobab first helped labour inspectorates from 14 member states with fundamentals: audience analysis, content planning, visuals, engagement and analytics. A second session narrowed the field to a workshop for five Southern African member states focused on private security services. The progression matters. “Best practices” became practice only after a broad first pass exposed where participants needed to work with their own material.
In Dakar in 2019, the job looked more physical. For Women Deliver’s Deliver for Good launch, Baobab managed vendors, event branding, media coordination and radio preparation. More than 30 journalists attended; television, radio and online outlets covered the event. The visible outcome was a crowded press moment. The actual product was alignment before the microphones came on.
What it costs - and what it buys
That split reveals the business model. At the edge are fixed-price knowledge products: a reader can buy a report without a discovery call. At the center is custom institutional work: research, message design, campaigns, training, events, stakeholder engagement and evaluation assembled around a particular objective. The customers are correspondingly institutional - governments, international organizations, foundations, universities, companies, nonprofits and civil-society groups.
The alternatives are easy to name but difficult to compare neatly. A large development consultancy may offer more procurement muscle. A global PR network may offer more media offices. A local specialist may carry deeper knowledge in one country or sector. An in-house team may cost less once the work becomes permanent. Baobab’s claim is the combination: African and diaspora context, bilingual and cross-cultural delivery, research discipline, communications execution and access to policy and business networks.
A cross-border project where evidence, narrative and stakeholder access must reinforce one another.
A commodity press-office brief, a single-market job with no cultural gap, or work without clear ownership and measurable action.
The approach also has conditions. It depends on clients willing to share context, make decisions and let local knowledge alter the plan. It is weaker when “Africa” is treated as one audience, when the remote team lacks grounded partners in the relevant market, or when success is reduced to impressions rather than changed behavior. A network is not a substitute for expertise, and a culturally mixed team is not automatically a culturally fluent one. Baobab’s own method works when the scope, staffing and feedback loops force those distinctions into the open.
The change of mind behind the company
Kitoyi has written that she did not set out with a grand plan to become an entrepreneur; she followed opportunities and made decisions around the life she wanted. Years later, after work connected to USAID was dissolved amid political change, she described entrepreneurship differently: as a way to build systems of impact that can outlast funding and political cycles. The romantic version of entrepreneurship is independence. The more useful version is redundancy - another route when one institution, budget or policy closes.
That helps explain Baobab’s current position at the intersection of strategic communications, public affairs, capital mobilization and diaspora engagement. In 2026, Africa.com appointed Kitoyi its US contributing editor, covering the Washington and New York decisions that shape African outcomes. Baobab also marked its tenth year around the UN General Assembly, offering delegation support, introductions and stakeholder engagement. The firm that once made distance workable now sells something slightly different: proximity to the right conversation without surrendering the perspective of the people discussed inside it.
Define one observable result. Build a team with lived context on both sides of the problem. Write the handoffs down. Translate literally and culturally. Use communications to move a decision, not merely decorate it. Then measure the action that followed.
The baobab tree is famous for storing what it needs to survive a dry season. The consulting firm that borrowed its name has built a less picturesque version of the same idea: evidence stored in research, relationships stored across countries, and operating knowledge stored in process. The point is not to eliminate the room. It is to make sure the room no longer decides whose work can travel.