Building an evidence function from the ground up.

The Work

The organization was entering a significant multi-year partnership with a major international scholarship program, operating across dozens of partner universities globally, with no internal MEL staff or systems in place. They needed to be able to demonstrate impact, track progress, and improve programming over time. Before any systems could be built, the team needed a shared understanding of what measurement meant in their context and why it mattered. We started there.

From that foundation, we built the full architecture. The logframe was designed to align with both the organization's theory of change and the funder's internal results framework, a dual alignment that required careful negotiation of language, indicators, and expectations across both sides. Alongside it, we developed an indicator workbook, data collection tools, and a set of trackers to manage the distinct data streams the program generated: partner organization interactions, direct counselling services, and program-wide activities. Dashboards brought the data together for quarterly KPI reviews and annual reflective sessions that the team ran internally. We also built impact measurement across three dimensions from the start: breadth, depth, and durability, because we knew that reaching numbers of scholars and partner organizations would only tell part of the story.

The second strand of the work was building the people alongside the systems. We developed a junior fellow into a full-time qualitative research role and supported the recruitment and development of a dedicated MEL manager. The team was deliberately kept lean: two people, well-trained and well-equipped, capable of running the full evidence function without external support. Both were coached through live implementation cycles with responsibility transferred progressively until they were operating independently. By the time we stepped back, they were running quarterly data reviews, conducting annual KAP surveys across partner universities, and producing donor-standard reporting from inside the organization.

As the grant period closed, we supported the team to conduct an outcome evaluation, synthesizing the evidence base they had built across the full program period. That evaluation became the foundation for the Phase 2 funding application. We worked alongside the team to translate findings into a compelling case for continued investment: grounding the proposal in their own data, surfacing what had worked and why, and positioning the organization as one that not only delivered results but had the internal systems to prove it. In a grant environment where many programs did not make it through, they did.