By Jennifer Bisgard, Independent Senior Evaluator, and Jerusha Govender, Director at Palmer Development Group
Measuring success amid change and uncertainty
Geopolitics has entered a period of profound instability. The governance architecture that shaped the post-Second World War order is under strain, and international development aid, as we have known it, has begun to unravel. Funders and philanthropy in particular are under growing pressure to step up: to do more, to work differently, and to help safeguard decades of hard-won development gains. Philanthropy is being called on to innovate, collaborate, take greater risks, fund systems change, embrace participatory and community-led approaches, and move beyond conventional grant-making toward more adaptive funding instruments.
These calls are both valid and necessary. Yet they raise a question that receives far less attention than it deserves: what do these shifts mean for how funders define, assess and learn from success?
When a carefully constructed Theory of Change cannot withstand unexpected events, and familiar Logframes, Logic Models and Results-Based Management approaches begin to feel inadequate, must funders work out how to adapt on their own? The answer is more encouraging than it may first appear. While philanthropy is being disrupted by instability, so too is the field of monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL). Over the past decade, the MEL community has built a rich set of approaches for aligning evaluative practice with precisely the kind of funding philanthropy is now being asked to pursue.
A shifting context
The disruption facing philanthropy is not simply financial. It is exposing the limits of a model built around prediction, control, certainty, attribution and compliance — the very model that conventional MEL was designed to support. Many of the assumptions that shaped traditional MEL and IMPACT MEASUREMENT AND MANAGEMENT (IMM) approaches are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain in a world defined by uncertainty, complexity and rapid change.
Funders are being asked to embrace complexity, innovate in their approaches, and adapt to the varied contexts in which programmes and communities operate. Where head counts and activity tracking once offered reassurance about every rand spent, funders now need a deeper understanding of the relationships and conditions that drive change — and of how their own decisions ripple through the systems they seek to influence.
Matching MEL to the problem, not the other way around
Part of the answer lies in recognising that not every funder pivot requires the same MEL pivot. Much of philanthropy has historically supported relatively simple programmes with a linear theory of change . Think about supporting agricultural entrepreneurs who needs new skills, equipment and capital to expand crop production. Here, straightforward baseline-and-endline MEL, focused on effectiveness, efficiency, scale-up and accountability, still works well.
Complicated programmes – childhood vaccination campaigns, for example, with cold chains, skilled personnel and exacting records – need more complicated MEL, with data quality assessments built in to protect validity and integrity. The outcomes here are usually well understood and can be benchmarked against international evidence from similar programmes.
Complex programmes, however, are a different proposition. Funders increasingly want to support innovation and systems change – transforming education systems, adapting to climate change and building resilience, strengthening democratic institutions, or backing communities to define and solve their own problems. Conventional MEL, built for simple or complicated work, struggles to add value when a programme is genuinely dynamic, contested and addressing multiple, interacting challenges at once. Misalignment shows up here first: funders who bring complicated-programme MEL to a complex-systems intervention will find a disconnection between the data and what is actually happening on the ground.
This is not new territory
Philanthropy does not need to invent its way out of this from scratch. Over the past decade, and with growing urgency since the demise of USAID, evaluation thinkers around the world have been preparing for this transition.
At the global level, the United Nations Evaluation Group made the future of evaluation the central theme of its 2025 work, prompted directly by the UN’s own Pact for the Future: a recognition that evaluation itself has to evolve if it is to remain useful in a more volatile, contested world. In the United States, the Equitable Evaluation Initiative has spent several years building a framework that asks foundations to examine the values, assumptions and power dynamics embedded in their evaluation practice. They argue that it is the starting point for all their work, not as an add-on.
Across the globe, including in South Africa, a cluster of transformative evaluation approaches has emerged. These are more holistic, context-sensitive and justice-oriented. They prioritise equity, participation and systemic change, and centre on trusting relationships, power and the well-being of people and the planet. These include:
- Made-in-Africa Evaluation shows that context, culture, history and belief systems shape what evaluation should look like across Africa’s diverse realities, and offers methods designed to embed sustainable, community-led practice. This framework and associated tools was launched in Johannesburg in early June 2026.
- Footprint Evaluation asks evaluators to take responsibility for the lasting impact their work leaves on people, ecosystems and contexts — who benefits, what unintended consequences might arise, and how evaluation can build capacity rather than simply extract data.
Feminist Evaluation, developed by South African evaluator Donna Podems, centres gender equity, voice and power, and is explicit that this is not only about evaluating programmes for women but about transforming how evaluation is done — prioritising care, relationships and social justice over a narrow claim to neutrality.
Regenerative Evaluation moves beyond measuring outcomes toward nurturing living systems, drawing on regenerative design and indigenous knowledge to treat evaluation as a process that helps ecosystems, communities and organisations thrive, replacing extractive metrics with co-created, adaptive feedback loops.
Blue Marble Evaluation takes a planetary view, recognising that local actions are entangled with global systems, and uses a systems lens to support evaluation of challenges — like climate change and inequality — that ignore organisational and national boundaries.
Together, these transformative evaluation approaches reframe the purpose of evaluation: they shift power, honour context, and aim not only to measure change but to contribute to it. They are not abstract theory. They are already being practised, and they already speak directly to the demands now being placed on philanthropy.
What Funders Can Do Now
Funders can shift by:
- Right-sizing MEL to the nature of the work, using the simple-complicated-complex programme distinction as a diagnostic rather than applying one logframe or theory of change across their portfolio;
- Building in flexibility, pairing longer-term outcome indicators with shorter learning cycles that let strategy adapt as evidence comes in;
- Funding the MEL function adequately and investing in opportunities to test new methods and tools, since participatory, relationship-centred approaches need more time and trust-building, not less; and
- Treating partners and communities as co-designers of what success looks like, rather than recipients of a top down framework.
Why trust matters
Underpinning all of this is trust. It sits at the centre of every successful systems-change effort. In a high-trust environment, communities, partners and funders have psychological safety to surface problems and difficult findings openly. There is a shared willingness to take informed risks. All stakeholders need to understand that systems change is a journey requiring flexibility and that transformative MEL approaches are an intrinsic part of the journey.
Without trust it is impossible to identify unintended outcomes as learning opportunities rather than evidence of failure.
Without trust, learning becomes performance, innovation becomes risky rather than valuable, and evaluation becomes extractive rather than generative.
Looking ahead
As systems change, innovation and the cross-cutting demands of climate and environmental work become greater priorities for South African philanthropy, these tools are increasingly suited to that agenda and are available to funders now.
Linear, attribution-focused MEL frameworks were never meant to capture the emergent, non-linear nature of transformation. We encourage funders to recognise that innovative complex programmes call for fundamentally different MEL philosophies, and the courage to adopt approaches that centre relationships, context, power and shared learning over control and compliance.
Embedding trust into MEL means redesigning what is measured, who defines success, and how findings are used. This shift from reporting-as-accountability to learning-as-partnership and treating unexpected outcomes as sources of insight rather than failures to be hidden.
If philanthropy is genuinely committed to systems change, building trust-based, adaptive, then relationship-centred evaluation systems is fundamental, not peripheral. It is the foundation everything else depends on. The tools already exist. What is needed now, is for funders to explore the full range of MEL tools available to them, and the collective will to use those tools.
Further Reading