Guides

Managing a budget effectively is one of the most important responsibilities for any organization. Staying within budget ensures that resources are used wisely, activities run smoothly, and the organization maintains trust with donors, partners, and stakeholders. To avoid overspending, organizations must adopt clear, practical, and well-structured financial management practices. The …

Good impact stories require excellent reporting. Having the right mix of quantitative evidence, well visualized and applied; positioning your case-studies, and providing the relevant theoretical background are all part of telling a good impact story. Start your report when you are designing the M&E framework. As implementation progresses, core things …

Special thanks to Shagun Gupta for this how to guide International assignments and project work are a defining aspect of development / aid work, be it through short-term consultancies or long-term contracts. As a development / aid worker, the chances of finding oneself working in different countries over the span …

Consultants are often used for short term projects in international development / aid. Typical projects include needs assessments, evaluations, and report writing. A good consultant can be extremely valuable to your program. However, if a consultant is not hired and managed well the results can be equally disappointing (and very expensive!). …

Sustainability is the nirvana of development. Everyone wants to get there but very few actually do. Most donors only want to fund projects that will be sustainable, so they include it as a section in their proposal template. Writing the sustainability section can either be very easy (if you just fill it …

International development projects can be closed for a variety of reasons. In the best case, a project will be closed because the problem it is trying to solve has been fixed. In other cases, a project could close because there is a lack of funding, the organisation no longer has …

Swim lane diagrams (also called ‘Rummler-Brache Diagrams’ and ‘Cross-Functional Flowcharts’) are a great way to break-down a process and visualise its steps. You can use this method to explore inefficiencies in a process and make improvements. The diagrams are also useful for communicating a process in chart-form to other people …

Supervision checklists are used during monitoring to verify if an activity has been implemented correctly. They can also be used to give feedback to the person running the activity to help them improve. Here are a few tips on how to design supervision checklists for international development / aid programs. You …

In international development / global aid programs, ‘cost-effectiveness analysis’ is a term given to comparing the relative costs of achieving the same outcome using different activities. For example, if a program uses one-on-one outreach to promote antenatal care for pregnant women, and another program uses mass SMS to do the same …

At tools4dev we get a lot of emails from people who want to make a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system for their program, but don’t know where to start. If that sounds familiar then this guide is for you. Know your program Before you start work on the M&E system it’s important …