Notes for a debate about cooperation and the “logframe”

The logical framework approach is an analytical tool or methodology, and was developed in the late sixties for planning and managing projects. Today, international cooperation agencies use it almost exclusively. From Honduras comes a critical contribution concerning the weaknesses and limitations of this tool for working in that country.

Ismael Moreno, SJ

While recognizing international cooperation’s enormous service in channeling funds from donor agencies in various—especially European—countries for development, human rights, advocacy, social and community training and organization, implemented locally by independently administered and supervised “counterparts” or “partners” organized under the generic name of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), we need to start thinking about this service.

These reflections don’t come from outside. They originate from within, from those fighting the same battle, and are sprinkled with “logical” results from a shared task. More specifically, they originate from Honduras’ very unstable and challenging reality, with all our country’s needs for international solidarity and support in the struggle to find a way out of a seemingly endless crisis.

More needed than ever

They’re deliberations made at a time when Honduras most needs international solidarity’s encouragement and support; when the recent murders of journalists and peasants have been joined by those of professional rights advocates, such as happened on September 22 with the murder of lawyer Antonio Trejo, an adviser to Aguán peasants who headed a group of lawyers that filed a constitutionality motion in the Supreme Court of Justice against the so-called Model Cities. Just two days later Choluteca’s special prosecutor for human rights, Manuel Eduardo Díaz, was shot dead. He had received repeated death threats for doing his job as a human rights defense attorney with integrity. He took part in the April-May 2008 hunger strike by prosecutors and many ordinary concerned citizens. And the threats continue, with the Honduran government showing no sign of will or ability to effectively investigate and identify the perpetrators and instigators of these crimes, let alone reverse the impunity that prevails throughout the country and across all institutions.

International cooperation is needed more day than ever. But, how is it being implemented, at least in Honduras? It’s even more necessary that we critically assess that question now, when we’re getting indications that it’s being rethought to favor bilateral cooperation with governments, to the detriment of support for civil society organizations. When cooperation is reduced to supporting governmental institutions, impunity and corruption are strengthened and the social, political and organizational fabric of ordinary people and communities is weakened.

Enough time has now passed to assess the conceptual and methodological model known as the logical framework or “logframe” approach. We consider it a failed model and thus think it’s time to look for and implement other methodologies that, while ensuring transparency in the use of resources and accountability to the donors, also ensure what we essentially want from cooperation: effective processes for transforming society’s social, political, cultural, productive and economic life.

There are undeniable achievements

No one can deny international cooperation’s accomplishments in Honduras. The service rendered has been, and is, considerable and has brought us many people with mystique and generosity. They have shared and channeled funds collected from humble hardworking people from the Northern countries, many of them motivated by their faith and commitment to build a more just and united world. In recent years, this cooperation has resulted in many people instilled with civic values and in numerous local processes that have influenced public policies to improve the living conditions of many families and communities.

After the Honduran coup, cooperation agencies, together with NGOs, performed a valuable service regarding human rights violations and demands for compliance with international conventions supporting victims, freedom of speech and various improvements in the institutional framework responsible for implementing justice. Funds provided by international agencies have enabled charges to be brought against the government in cases where environmentalists have been killed and for violations of prisoners’ rights.

International cooperation funds, especially from organizations linked to churches, have been used to disseminate knowledge and information, suggesting and supporting magazines, easy-to-understand pamphlets, videos and community radio programs; in other words alternative and altering media.

Although all this is true, over the years cooperation has left more dependent institutions than liberated processes and more people who won’t do anything without money than self-motivated volunteers. It has left practice divorced from ethics, volunteerism and the mystique of struggle.

With international money
and a common format

Under the generic name NGO, hundreds of agencies, organizations and institutions in Honduras are performing social, technical and human promotion activities, very diverse in nature and ideological orientation.

One characteristic unites and defines them: their dependence on foreign financing. They’re shooting up like mushrooms in Honduras. You’ll find an NGO hunkered down where you least expect it. And wherever you hear about an NGO or about civil society, that’s where you find cooperation money. You’ll be approached by a consultant with his laptop and signature technical jargon in these places at any moment. If you go into a village and hear a community leader talking about “relevance” or “expertise,” you can be sure that some consultant has been roaming about in those parts and cooperation money is flowing. You can be sure that they’ve passed through making a “baseline” or doing some other research in order to develop “terms of reference.”

Each of these entities is working with a common format called a logical framework. Now reduced to the more in-group term “logframe,” it was originally developed for the US Agency for International Development and is now standard issue
for European cooperation agencies. This format is based on the idea that everything created, accomplished and reported on can and must fit into a fixed intervention in the sector of society where the projects are implemented. You thus not only have to know how to formulate an objective but, at the end of the day, it also has to be factually verifiable by indicators, actions that can be counted and proven.

The logframe approach is a planning method that stems from a context analysis, a baseline that identifies the social “stakeholders,” alliances and trends and, to continue our use of the argot, an analysis of the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats). This baseline study has to meet the intervention objective the implementing (or financing) agency wishes to accomplish and must be consistent with the “mission and vision” that identifies it. To achieve the objective, they have to know how to code outcomes, accounting for each one along with its activities, goals, indicators and, finally, its verifiers. All of this fits neatly into a chart.

So many “dispersed forces”

All entities receiving funding from foreign cooperation, especially from Europe, dedicate themselves to presenting projects, performing fieldwork and submitting reports according to the very same logframe format. Certain unmistakable signs identify those working closely with it. When a list is circulated at a meeting on which each participant has to write down his/her name, phone number, age, email address, organization and signature, you know the completed list is a verifiable indicator of an activity (the meeting) being recorded in fulfillment of an outcome aimed at achieving the objective proposed by the host organization in implementing its project. In short, the logframe is being complied with.

Each NGO worth its salt now has a strategic plan for a period ranging from three to five years and must seek funding from international cooperation to implement it. Taking care of the relationship with the different international cooperation agencies makes it possible for projects or programs to move forward, complying with their strategic plan, accomplishing it and often even continuing to exist.

The strategic plans of both the Honduran NGOs and the cooperation agencies are based on their logframe. This causes conflicts and clashes of interests as each seeks to use the other to push forward its own plan. The result is an accumulation of individual efforts, of “scattered forces,” as the famous Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío, put it. Among so much misery and violence in Honduras, we find one trail of NGOs trying to meet their strategic plans and another of cooperation agencies looking for an NGO in order to comply with their own.

Who depends more on whom?

NGOs from the South need the money from the North’s cooperation agencies to meet their strategic plans and the North’s cooperation agencies need the South’s NGOs to meet theirs. Who needs whom the most?

A convincing answer is hard to find but the truth is that cooperation agencies could survive without us while we couldn’t survive without them. This creates imbalance and an obviously unequal power relationship, in which international cooperation not only ensures financing but also tends to ensure contents and issues for the well known and age old reason that “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” In the worst examples of this asymmetrical relationship, the Northern agencies essentially outsource the implementation of their own strategic plans to their “counterparts” in the South.

What’s important…

One of the logical framework’s most important categories is accountability for money received from cooperation. If NGOs have financing from four or five cooperation agencies to implement an equal number of projects, they will have to dedicate a lot of time and energy to meticulously implementing and accounting for the projects according to the rules, format and schedule of each agency.

Relationships or alliances with other NGOs or other civil society organizations will be ancillary to implementing the logical framework, which must be the top priority. According to this logic, national alliances only acquire importance if they help in meeting the requirements set out in the agreement. If the logframe establishes that on finishing the project they must have held several context analysis meetings with different local organizations, what’s important isn’t the alliance—its quality, purpose or duration—but that they’ve accomplished the activities, with indicators and verifiers of attendance, time and costs that ensure the commitment was met with the money they received.

Labyrinthine and inward-turned

The relationship is strictly bilateral: NGO to cooperation agency. Each NGO has relationships with its respective cooperation agencies. And each cooperation agency has bilateral relationships with each NGO that implements the projects it chooses to finance. Ultimately, the cooperation agency defines the relationships the NGO will establish, almost always under its guidance and financing. It’s often the case that a cooperation agency enables relationships or eventual coordination among the NGOs it finances.

Each NGO’s relationship with other organizations responds primarily to accomplishing iits project according to the logframe. Crossovers of interest may occur among NGOs when they seek each other out in complying with their own logframe, but each one works engrossed in the task of making the money it has gotten tally with outcomes, indicators and verifiers. As each NGO relates to others to implement its own projects, this results, even if unintentionally, in a tenacious struggle of each against all or, sometimes of each looking for all, but on behalf of its own strategic plans.

All activities have a funding category and each activity must be verified, down to details bordering on the ridiculous. Voluntary work vanishes with the logical framework. And when there is input from the community or for the NGO’s own “goals,” the logical framework must account for it in money terms. The logframe ends up imprisoning NGOs and the communities they work with in a “logical labyrinth.” Everyone’s busy and tired, grappling with concepts and expressions that seem coherent, but they’re buried in systemic self-absorption.

Every man for himself...

While recognizing the very good will and intentions of many international cooperation workers and without denying the many positive achievements attained through projects and direct work with poor communities, the cooperation phenomenon, not unlinked to the proliferation of NGOs, generates dynamics that lead to institutionalization and develops a maze of issues, technicalities, interests, activities, indicators and verifiers unleashed by the logframe. This in turn promotes a competitive, self-absorbed, individualistic race, best described by the phrase “Every man for himself.”

While it’s true that projects positively affect their beneficiaries, the logframe per se is leaving a wake of technicians and specialists amongst both donors and NGOs. Experts in making the amounts fit the codes have emerged, with the ability to present outcomes that look and sound as if the social, human, political and territorial realities have been changed. Use of the logical framework is giving rise to an elite specialized in designing projects that, using the logframe’s magic formula, fit the data rather than the other way around. The projects they are designing may fit the formula, but they are increasingly distanced from the vital economic and human realities of the final recipients that justify these projects. Technique dominates and mystique, working-for-free and volunteerism are curtailed.

An elite of experts

The logframe’s outline of a work plan turns cooperation’s relationship with NGOs—maintained with money and technical and abstract formulations— into a vicious circle through descriptive and financial reports that establish the need for a further project with the same baseline and of course following the logframe. The logframe institutes processes that almost invariably revert to the same dependent situation for NGOs and the need for new economic injections as a condition for their survival. Furthermore, by virtue of the vertical relationship with cooperation agencies, where the money, issues and methodologies originate, the ageencies themselves become the indispensable paternal attendants of the ultimate beneficiaries.

While the logframe approach promotes a privileged elite of specialists, consultants and technicians, it splits NGOs and the projects’ final recipients apart. It ensures that the NGOs are always very busy accomplishing many activities but are self-engrossed, thereby reinforcing the social and political evil affecting so many inward-turned Honduran organizations, thus contributing to the same social demobilization as politics, football, religion and moonlighting, which keep people in constant movement, occupied and eventually enthused but removed from thinking about and designing authentic, popular and transformative proposals.

With the funding they get from cooperation, NGOs in Honduras are a real power. But that power demobilized the society of the poor. In many cases these NGOs exercise power with the same logic as political parties, religions, soccer teams and the corporate media: they make it seem as if their work is not only good but indispensable by responding to peoples’ very real and basic needs. Over the years, NGOs have acquired abilities to transfer the power they say builds communities and grassroots organizations, but those who are finally “empowered” aren’t community organizations but the NGOs themselves. And, because NGOs are run flesh and blood people, those who finally have power, in the name of the poor, are the technicians, directors, consultants and experts.

They had no clear accountability

One argument underpinning the logframe is the need for transparent use of foreign funding so as to respect the intentions of the Northern donors, whose money ultimately comes from the taxpayers in those countries. The idea is that the logframe should demonstrate consistency between what is written in the projects and what actually happens.

There’s no argument about the need for funds to be used transparently. And, to be fair, the promotion of the logframe
is explained by cooperation agencies receiving a constant stream of data about misappropriation or diversion of funds for purposes that weren’t agreed upon.

In the 1980s and even early 1990s it was common knowledge in Honduras that cooperation funding was often diverted, both by those who ran the NGOs and by the leaders of organizations these funds supported. And according to their own testimonies, more than a few donor agency officials also dipped into the till, although to a lesser degree. In some cases, significant amounts of funds were diverted unjustifiably.

Especially during the 1980s, the diversion of cooperation funding was almost common practice, justified by the need
to support struggles against repressive governments. In those days they couldn’t openly present projects or reports because doing so put the leaders of the applicant organization or institution at risk. These same arguments were used to justify not rendering clear accounts. Some circles of organizations working with foreign funding used what they called “compartmentalized” reports. And the cooperating agencies’ directors and officials openly supported the practice of the unreported diversion of funds using the noble argument of supporting grassroots struggles, or simply turning a blind eye to it. Everybody knew that transparent accounting wasn’t an NGO characteristic in those fateful years.

Today funding control is strict

With the various peace agreements signed in Central America and the reduction in oppositional political conflict, cooperation started supporting the peace processes as well as political advocacy to improve the working of government institutions, social auditing, sustainable development projects, emergency response and risk management.

Cooperation began to specialize and to use its control mechanisms more carefully, demanding detailed accounting from its counterparts. Issues changed and new approaches arose, but the old NGOs remained, with leaders who had engaged in or inherited practices from the past.

In this context, donor agencies developed new proposals for accountability and direct impact in the use of funds until ultimately arriving at the logical framework. The 1998 Hurricane Mitch tragedy revealed funding diversions and evident corruption in Honduras, which accelerated the process of the cooperation agencies. They became determined to have a more direct presence in monitoring and auditing funding and ensuring that it complied with the donors’ wish to alleviate poverty and promote citizen participation in the search for answers to the root causes of inequity. After Mitch, “taking care” of funding was a decisive factor for cooperation. Throughout Central America, this consolidated the logical framework methodology.

Nonetheless, the logframe’s strict measures to control the use of funding hasn’t only failed to achieve the desired transparency but has triggered a variety of subterfuges for diverting funds to individuals.

NGOs are stuck like
ticks to the donor agencies

A tool ensuring transparent accountability for funds NGOs receive from cooperation remains a necessity. It is vital to helping cooperation funds promote processes that can genuinely build citizenship and transform society. But the logframe is a flawed tool. It doesn’t even ensure transparent use of funds, let alone contribute to transformation processes.

The elites who have specialized in logframes have also acquired expertise in “logical” reports that don’t ensure that funds have been used correctly. The only thing they ensure is that the funds tally with the outcomes, indicators and verifiers. But who ensures that the lists, videos, photos, receipts or other verifiers always correspond with reality and not virtual or rigged constructions?

One evening I went out to a diner with a colleague. We discussed issues related to the logical framework and afterwards we asked for a receipt, “a verifier.” The young waitress, with all the naturalness of one who does this frequently, asked if I wanted to fill it in myself or if she should do it. After telling her that she should fill it in with the cost of what we had eaten, she asked me “How much do you want me to put on the receipt?” That led me to ask her if she often had people ask for receipts with a different total than what was spent. There was no hesitation in her answer: “Everyone does it.” It’s only a small example: the logframe has left a trail of self-engrossed NGOs trapped in ensuring their own survival, stuck like ticks to the donor agencies and using dynamics that violate transparency.

The logframe has
done all it can do

A thorough review of the relationship among international aid agencies, local NGOs and final recipients or beneficiaries of donors’ funds is needed. The tool called a logical framework has done all it can do. It has left us with relationships defined by dependence and verticality, NGOs engrossed in their own internal dynamics and a social movement with leaders devoid of mystique and voluntary commitment.

Perhaps today’s accounting is better than before, but it has been at the expense of forming an elite of experts and promoting a “quagmire” mentality: everybody fighting tooth and nail to get out of the mud on their own without noticing those beside them in the same condition; all stretching out their hands and gazing outwards, only towards cooperation.

The footprint left by the logframe has been so deep that we have to question whether it’s still possible to reverse its negative aspects. After so much time with “verifiers,” is it possible to build processes based on voluntary work by communities, grassroots organizations and NGO members, to promote projects based on voluntary contributions by “counterparts” and especially by beneficiaries themselves, on their own behalf? It’ll only be possible with new concepts, new visions and new methodologies. But breaking away from this flawed tool is as essential as starting a process to discover a new concept of cooperation and work with grassroots sectors.

We have to look for
a new methodology

This new concept and its methodology must enjoy the full participation of donor agencies, NGOs, and community and social organizations. We need a new tool that can help foster participation, opening each agency to creative relationships with the others and to more horizontal relationships among donors, NGOs and the final beneficiaries; promoting mystique and voluntary work among the different sectors of society, especially between the recipients or beneficiaries and those writing projects for international cooperation funding.

In Honduras we need vision and a few tools that can combine objective and rational data reporting with an investment in mystique, free and voluntary work, so that verifiable data isn’t just based on numbers, on quantifiable data, but on the ability of beneficiaries, promoters, technicians and consultants to ensure social, cultural and transformational processes beyond the duration of a project.

We hope these reflections will open a frank discussion aimed at finding such new proposals. We also trust that they will
not become the “verifier” of an outcome that was aimed at discussing the logical framework, but ends up a document kept in a file awaiting the approving glance of an auditor, and then nothing.

Ismael Moreno, sj, is the envío correspondent in Honduras.

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