<span class="vcard">Shift the power Director</span>
Shift the power Director

Rethinking the logframe: A reflection on power, purpose, and measurement

It’s striking how enduring the logframe has been. Perhaps because many organisations were smaller and more centralised then, adoption was easier. Or perhaps once embedded in donor systems, it was too difficult to dislodge. It often feels like an attempt to nail spaghetti to a wall — to force complex, relational, adaptive work into a linear accountability framework.

Philanthropy didn’t understand what it was trying to fix

Here’s what I’ve observed: the things we try to reform are rarely the ones that matter most. Reform tends to fixate on what can be measured, managed, and credited—where reformers still believe control is within reach—while quietly avoiding what they don’t understand, where control is harder to find. And nothing, I’d argue, is more misunderstood—or more resistant to control—than the gift.

These cannibalistic men

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Inter-American Foundation (IAF) are corpses. They have been devoured and buried alive while they were still throbbing. They are the first missing persons of a very quickly orchestrated system of mass destruction. Nobody knows where they are or what has happened. 

Organising in dark times

What will it take to build a global civil society and funding system based on new ways of deciding and doing, that harnesses and mobilizes solidarity, money and other resources in ways that centre equity, justice and flourishing lives for all?