TalPlay
Strategy & applied economics

Complex challenges need clear paths.

TalPlay works where economic ambition, Indigenous community priorities, and frontier sectors meet: in BC, across Canada, and in complex international contexts where standard approaches fall short.

Start a conversation Meet the builder
The practice

One idea, carried into a single community, crossed borders on its own, to Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, and Morocco, owned entirely by the people who took it up and still running twenty years later. That is what TalPlay builds: work communities make their own, that puts people in the driver's seat and outlasts the consultant who helped start it. The proof that money is not everything is a program that no longer needs you.

The person behind the practice

I build things that hold.

I'm Naser, a builder. For twenty-five years I've built programs that had every reason to fail, in some of the hardest places to build them, and watched them last. TalPlay is where that experience works for you now.

I sit at an unusual intersection: field practitioner, instructor in business and strategy, and researcher. I didn't plan the combination, but I'd fight to keep it. The instructor makes me explain the work in plain language. The practitioner keeps the research honest about what happens on the ground. And the builder makes sure that at the end of the thinking, something exists, whether a plan, a curriculum, a facility, or a map, that still works when I'm not in the room.

I've worked and lived in communities across many countries and regions, in places where the challenges looked intractable and the job was to come out the other side with something impactful. When you spend your life that close to communities under strain, development work stops being an abstraction. You know what a good program feels like from the receiving end, and what a careless one costs. That perspective came with me into every context I've worked in since, and it's with me now, on this coast, in this work.

25+ yearsIn fragile, emerging, and frontier economies
Field practitionerPrograms designed, funded, and delivered
Educator & applied researcherCurriculum design and program evaluation
Based in CanadaWorking in BC, across Canada, and internationally
Currently

Right now, my desk faces the Pacific.

Two threads run through my current work. The first is First Nations community and economic development here in British Columbia. It is relationship first, sovereignty aware, and on the community's timeline, not mine.

The second is the seaweed sector: ecosystem maps so people can find each other, sector strategy so the growth is deliberate, and company profiles so the story told about this coast is accurate. A new sector is a market system being born, and I've spent a career learning what makes market systems hold.

Where TalPlay works

Three domains.
One integrated practice.

Each domain draws on the same core discipline: rigorous economic thinking, systems understanding, and the judgment to know what will actually work in context.

01

Indigenous
Community Development

TalPlay works alongside First Nations on the full architecture of community planning, not only economic strategy but the education, youth, cultural continuity, and governance dimensions that make economic development meaningful and sustainable over the long run.

  • Comprehensive Community Plans (CCPs)
  • Economic self-determination strategy
  • Youth and education program design
  • Cultural continuity and heritage integration
  • Governance capacity and institutional design
  • Funding navigation and partnership strategy
02

Seaweed
Sector

Canada's seaweed sector is entering a period of rapid change. TalPlay is among the few consultancies with deep, current knowledge of the sector, from market evidence and commercial pathways to coastal stewardship models and Indigenous partnership structures.

  • Seaweed market analysis and demand mapping
  • Commercialization pathway development
  • Marine biomass value chain assessment
  • Seaweed sector strategy
  • Indigenous coastal stewardship models
  • Investor and funder narrative development
03

Economic Recovery
& Regional Growth

Built on more than twenty-five years of work in fragile and complex economies, with UN agencies, governments, and development partners, this practice brings international-grade analytical rigour to regional growth challenges in Canada and globally.

  • Post-conflict and fragile economy recovery strategy
  • Livelihoods and market systems programming
  • Regional economic development planning
  • Sector analysis and investment case development
  • Innovation and commercialization strategy
  • International development program design
What the work looks like

Selected engagements.

Recent work across the practice. Each a different client and context, the same discipline.

01
Indigenous community development

Comprehensive Community Development Plan

Halfway River First Nation's 2027 to 2031 Community Comprehensive Development Plan: the roadmap that will guide the Nation in developing and implementing projects across infrastructure, land and resource development, health services, family support and social development, housing, education, and youth.

Engagement
  • Client: Halfway River First Nation
  • Region: Northern British Columbia
  • Plan period: 2027 to 2031
02
Socioeconomic & digital skills

Socioeconomic & Digital Skills Training

A training program to build the socioeconomic and digital marketing skills of Iraqi nationals, with a training-of-trainers component for IOM staff who then deliver directly to beneficiaries across multiple locations in Iraq, including areas of return.

Engagement
  • Client: International Organization for Migration (IOM)
  • Region: Iraq (West Asia)
  • Year: 2025
03
Youth & capacity building

Youth Internship Manual & Organizational Capacity Building

A Youth Internship Manual to help local organizations run internship programs focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights, designed to create meaningful, engaging experiences that equip interns with real advocacy skills, knowledge, and tools.

Engagement
  • Client: Oxfam
  • Region: West Asia & North Africa
  • Year: 2022 to 2023
04
Innovation & commercialization

Venture Development Program

A new venture creation program supporting faculty and students in their entrepreneurial pursuits, giving them the knowledge and skills to explore commercialization opportunities and translate research into ventures.

Engagement
  • Client: Canadian university
  • Region: Ontario, Canada
  • Year: 2022
05
Evaluation & data

Evaluation: Open Data & Gender-Responsive Budgeting

A final evaluation of a project enabling women, youth, and journalists to use data to advocate for gender-responsive budgeting and public policy. The work covered the evaluation plan, a mixed-methods data strategy, key informant interviews and focus groups, analysis, and the evaluation report.

Engagement
  • Client: Internews
  • Region: Iraq (West Asia)
  • Year: 2021
06
Evaluation

Evaluation: Peacebuilding & Youth Empowerment

A multi-country evaluation of a UNESCO peacebuilding and innovation program across Jordan, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco. The work covered evaluation design, mixed-methods instruments, data collection and analysis, and a findings report presented to UNESCO in Paris and New York.

Engagement
  • Client: UNESCO
  • Region: West Asia & North Africa
  • Year: 2020 to 2021
07
Social innovation

ENGAGE Social Innovation Hub

A social innovation incubation program covering program structure, operational components, learning content, space design, mentorship and coaching systems, and connections with community organizations, donors, and investors.

Engagement
  • Client: Al-Quds University, Jerusalem
  • Region: Palestine (West Asia)
  • Year: 2015 to 2016
The foundation

A quiet record in difficult contexts.

The practice draws on more than twenty-five years across international development, Indigenous community planning, seaweed sector work, and applied economics, across ten countries and some of the most complex operating environments in the world.

25+Years of applied experience
10+Countries and complex contexts
$36M+In programs designed and delivered
8International agencies, incl. 2 UN

Selected partners & clients

Halfway River First Nation
IOM
UNESCO
Oxfam
Internews
Al-Quds University

Academic collaborations

North Island College
Northern Lights College
Selkirk College
University of Calgary
St. Lawrence College
University of Waterloo
Canada First Nations comprehensive community planning, and venture and commercialization work with universities and research institutions.
West Asia Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, and Palestine: socioeconomic and digital skills, evaluations, youth programs, and social innovation.
North Africa Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and Sudan: peacebuilding, youth empowerment, and program evaluation.
East Africa Kenya and the wider region: livelihoods, community development, and program design.
Selected earlier work

The programs behind the numbers.

Complex programs across digital learning, education, economic development, and humanitarian response. A few that still shape how the practice works.

Community learning

Community-Based Learning & Action Model

Born from flipping a culture of waiting for handouts into one of local action. The model mobilized untapped human and social capital and put communities in the driver's seat, spreading from Palestine to Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, and Morocco. Twenty years on it still runs, self-reliant, with full community ownership.

20 years · 100% community-owned

Digital learning

Netketabi

A national digital learning program built from nothing: original content, the systems to deliver it, and the digital skills young people need to become builders and problem solvers themselves. The point was never the technology. It was opening a pathway for a generation growing up in a fragile context.

$10M contract · $500K raised

Education systems

Model School Networks

A replicable model linking model schools to community learning and development centers, so that what a school learned, its community kept. Digital skills are not built only in a classroom. They are built in the community too.

Design & technical lead

Refugee education

Remedial Education for Refugee Children

Remedial learning for refugee children in host communities: meeting displaced children where their schooling was interrupted and building the footing they need to catch up and rejoin the classroom.

Host communities

Local economic development

Empowering Municipalities

Local economic development built at the municipal level, putting the tools of economic growth in the hands of the level of government closest to the ground.

Municipal LED

Livelihoods

Micro-Finance for Youth Entrepreneurship

A microfinance facility that paired lending with enterprise support, so youth-led ventures and small businesses got the money and the capacity to use it. Either half on its own quietly disappoints everyone in it.

Small business & youth

Humanitarian

Emergency & Recovery Programs

Emergency response run alongside long-term development across seven programs at once. In a fragile setting, the crisis and the future refuse to take turns, so the programs cannot either.

Seven programs

Higher education

Innovation Curriculum Suite

Four university courses on creativity, design thinking, innovation leadership, and financing for innovation. Teaching innovation is a useful discipline for anyone who advises on it.

4 courses designed

Thinking on the record

The advice I find myself giving over coffee.

Short notes from the work. People come to TalPlay for delivery, but they come back for the thinking, so here is some of it, free. If one of these starts an argument, write to me. That's what it's for.

Sector Note
Comprehensive Community Planning for First Nations: what works, what doesn't, and what planners rarely say out loud

After working through multiple CCP processes, a frank assessment of where community planning succeeds and where it quietly fails, and what Nations and planners need to do differently to make these documents matter.

Market Analysis
The Seaweed Opportunity in Canada: what the evidence actually says

An honest look at the commercial potential of Canada's seaweed sector, separating real market signals from institutional enthusiasm. A new sector is a market system being born, and it holds because the connections hold, not because of the excitement around it.

Field Note
The money is rarely the missing piece

Every few years someone looks at a struggling local economy and concludes it needs capital. Usually the loans that work sit inside a system that already works. Capital dropped into a broken system doesn't fix the system. It gives the failure a budget. Trace one transaction end to end, fix where it dies, then fund it.

Field Note
The certificate is not the finish line

Most youth employment programs end on the wrong day: graduation day. The hard part was never the training. It's the first paying customer, the first contract, the first month of doing the thing for real with rent due. Design backwards from that first transaction, and build the program to remove what stands in the way of it.

Essay
After the Report: why economic strategy fails at implementation, and how to design against it

Most strategy work ends with a document. The interesting question is what happens after, and why the choices made during strategy design determine whether implementation succeeds or quietly stalls on a shelf.

How TalPlay thinks

Economies are built through systems, trust, and timing.

A strategy is only useful if it can hold up in the real world: in budget meetings, community conversations, investor diligence, and the uneven conditions where change actually happens. TalPlay is built for the gap between the plan and the outcome.

01

Start with the operating reality.

Before recommending a path, TalPlay studies the institutions, incentives, market signals, histories, and constraints already shaping the system, not the system someone wishes existed.

02

Make the choices explicit.

The work turns ambiguity into decisions: what to build, what to pause, what to test, who must be involved, and what evidence is still missing.

03

Design for use after the report.

Outputs are built to be acted on by boards, councils, funders, and project teams long after the engagement ends, not filed away after the presentation.

04

Respect the relationship that makes work possible.

In Indigenous communities, fragile economies, and emerging sectors alike, trust is the infrastructure. TalPlay approaches every engagement with the patience that trust requires.

Begin here

Bring me the messy version.

You don't need a polished brief. If you're a First Nation weighing a community or economic plan; if you're a UN team or an NGO and a program isn't landing; if you're building in the seaweed sector and the map is still blank; if you need a curriculum designed or an evaluation done, write to me and tell me where it hurts.

Not a project yet, just a question? That's fine too. Some of my best work started as someone asking for advice.

Here's the promise: work with me today, and within two years you could have programs you have never had before, built on your context, made with your community, and creating the ground for a better tomorrow for the generations that follow.

Comprehensive community planning Seaweed sector First Nations partnerships Economic recovery Commercialization strategy Regional growth
naser@talplay.ca