Capabilities
What we are
built to do
Five capabilities. They can be commissioned separately or run end to end — most partners start with one and add the others once the first has been tested.
Capability 01
Programme
design
Turning an intention into an architecture: a defined problem, a stated mechanism, named indicators, and a cost per outcome you can defend before anything is procured.
What it covers
- Problem definition and baseline research in the specific district or population
- Theory of change, written as a causal chain rather than a wish list
- Indicator set mapped to SDG targets and to the frameworks the partner already reports into
- Cost-per-outcome model, with the sensitivities that would break it stated openly
- Safeguarding, consent and data-protection plan
- Delivery plan, partner selection and risk register
What you receive
- A programme design document that a board, a fund or an auditor can read without a translator
- A measurement plan with the instruments attached
- An explicit list of what will not be measurable, and why
- A budget with unit economics rather than a lump sum
If the design work concludes that a programme should not be run, that is the deliverable. We would rather lose the delivery contract than build something we know will not hold.
Capability 02
Field
delivery
Execution in places where the logistics are the hard part — flood-exposed districts, under-served schools, and households outside any formal service network.
Partner selection and contracting
Identifying local organisations with genuine reach into the target population, assessing their capacity honestly, and contracting on terms that do not quietly transfer all the risk to the smallest party.
Procurement and supply
Sourcing, quality assurance and last-mile logistics, with local manufacture and local supply preferred wherever it is available at an acceptable standard.
Training and community engagement
Preparing local teams to deliver both the product and the education around it, and engaging the people who decide whether a programme is accepted in a community — which is rarely the people on the invitation list.
Safeguarding in the field
Conduct standards, reporting routes and consent processes applied to every person working on our behalf, including partner staff and volunteers.
Operational reporting
Delivery data captured as the programme runs rather than reconstructed at the end, so that the measurement stage has something real to work with.
Capability 03
Measurement
& verification
The capability most implementers cannot offer, and the one that decides whether a result is usable in a disclosure, an audit or a board paper.
Measurement
- Baseline at intake and endline at a fixed interval, on the same instrument and population
- Control or comparison group where one is feasible; an explicit statement where it is not
- Attrition reported as a number, not absorbed into the result
- Data governance: minimum-necessary collection, access control, no identifiable participant data shared with funders or partners
Verification
- An evidence trail a third party can use to reconstruct the result without speaking to us
- Raw instruments, method notes, exclusions, and the reasoning behind every adjustment
- Independent verification by a party with no stake in the outcome, where scale or partner requirements warrant it
- Output formatted for the reporting frameworks the partner is already subject to
Capability 04
Advisory &
sector capability
For institutions running their own social and environmental programmes and wanting them to hold up — to a regulator, an auditor, a board, or their own standards.
A great deal of social and environmental spending is committed with real intent and reported with weak evidence. The usual cause is not dishonesty; it is that measurement was designed after delivery, by people who were not asked until the end.
This capability puts the architecture in place first — indicator design, data governance, reporting format — and builds the internal capability to run it, so the institution is not dependent on us to produce its own numbers.
Typically commissioned for
- Designing an impact framework and indicator architecture from scratch
- Aligning existing programmes to SDG targets and national reporting frameworks
- Building internal measurement and verification capability
- Preparing programme evidence for disclosure, assurance or audit
- Reviewing a portfolio and advising on what to scale, change or stop
Capability 05
Evaluation of
existing work
Independent review of programmes already running: what is working, what the data actually supports, and what should stop.
Evaluations are commissioned for one of two reasons. Either something is not working and nobody can say precisely what, or something is working and the evidence is not strong enough to justify scaling it.
We take both, on the same terms: full access to the delivery data, freedom to state a negative finding, and publication of the method alongside the conclusion. An evaluation that can only return good news is not an evaluation.