15 articles in this category
Grant reporting has a way of eating the calendar. You spend the last six months scrambling for data that proves your program worked, write the narrati...
Every grant officer I know has felt it: that hollow moment when a quarterly report arrives, full of tidy numbers — 500 trainings delivered, 10,000 mea...
Impact measurement was supposed to be the watchdog. The check on hubris. The way to prove that aid dollars, donor gifts, or program budgets actually c...
You built an impact framework to track what matters. But lately, you notice a creeping pattern: teams hit their numbers, yet the real-world change fee...
A few years back, I watched a well-funded evaluation team roll into a rural community with tablets, a tight timeline, and a stack of consent forms wri...
Here's a scene that plays out more often than anyone admits: A foundation releases its annual report, full of charts showing '3,000 students served' a...
So you have a data snag. Not a technical one—a deeper one. Your indicators were designed in a capital far from the community they measure. Your survey...
The clinic reported 1,200 patients treated. A clean number. funder loved it. But six month later, after a flood, only 200 returned. The output was tru...
You are running a job training program. You require a metric. Quickly. So you count 'number of graduates.' Easy. But what if graduates can't find work...
You run a participatory evaluation. You hold focus groups, distribute surveys in local languages, even hire community researchers. But when the final ...
Impact rankings look clean. A single number, a tidy order — first, second, third. Donors love them. Boards demand them. But here is the thing: every r...
Here is the thing: numbers make us feel safe. They promise objectivity, comparability, and the kind of tidy certainty that keeps boards happy and audi...
So you look at your dashboard and the green arrows are all pointing at speed. Rapid service delivery, quick outputs, short-cycle wins. But you feel it...
When a global health NGO rolled out a logframe for a water project in rural Kenya, the community's elders shrugged. The indicators measured taps insta...
A few years ago, I sat in on a review of an impact report for a girls' education program in northern Nigeria. The headline number was impressive: 1,20...