Meeting the need for quantitative measurement in community-led development programs

Picture this: You conduct a survey of a community-led development¹ (CLD) program in Sudan. The data indicates a large social transformation, with program participants reporting higher trust, inclusivity, and willingness to contribute to public goods. But when the same study uses behavioral games with real money, similar gains do not show up.

We witnessed this gap between reported and actual attitudes in our literature review of quantitative impact evaluations. But that’s not the only reason CLD programs are hard to measure. The secondary data analysis IDinsight conducted last year across 250+ pieces of evidence collected by Tostan, OVP, and Legado since 2016 points to several recurring themes:

• Definitions of core concepts for CLD work, such as trust, social capital, collective action, and well-being, varied across organizations and over time.
• Communities’ own ideas of well-being evolved as programs unfolded.
• Individual beliefs about harmful practices often moved ahead of perceived community norms.

Some of these challenges are inherent to the nature of CLD programs. But that shouldn’t hold the sector back from measuring it well. To bridge the gap, the Full Spectrum Evidence and Learning Initiative² (FSELI) has published a new web-based resource, Quantitative Measures for Holistic Community-Led Development. It compiles measurement guidance across four themes at the heart of CLD work:

1. Collective action
2. Inclusive governance
3. Social cohesion
4. Relationship between communities and local government.

In this blog, we will share what practitioners told us they needed, the two principles at the heart of the resource, and where this work is heading next.

What FSELI has heard from practitioners

Over recent months, FSELI coordinators and members ran two structured engagements with communities of CLD practitioners. The first was with the Lafia Community of Practice, a network facilitated by Tostan, in which 35 organisations responded. The second was with the Woven Community of Practice, a group of 14 East African organizations facilitated by the Woven Foundation; ten organizations responded. Both surveys were modest in scale, but the findings across them were consistent.

Practitioners told us they felt least equipped on external engagement and on accessing the knowledge and resources that would let them implement CLD well. 

When asked which knowledge products would be most useful, evaluation tools came first in the Lafia survey, with 80% rating them “very useful”. Several respondents asked for tools they could test and adapt in the field, rather than tools handed down for application. Taken together, the two engagements suggest there is appetite among practitioners for shared, practical measurement guidance. That need is what FSELI’s resource sets out to meet, and it does so through two straightforward principles.

Two principles

1. The first is to prioritize observed and revealed measures where the question concerns behavior: administrative records, structured observations, and behavioral proxies can be more precise about the construct than asking people whether they participate or cooperate. 
2. The second is to retain self-reported measures where the question concerns perceptions, beliefs, or attitudes (including both about their own views and what they perceive to be the views of others), leaning on validated scales adapted to context with multiple items combined into indices.

Neither principle is novel. Together, though, they are a useful corrective to a habit some CLD measurement has fallen into, of asking attitudinal questions to capture behavioral change. The resource pairs the principles with a browsable set of resources recommending measures across the four themes (collective action, inclusive governance, social cohesion, and community-local government relationship), so that teams designing their own surveys and observation tools have a place to start.

Where this sits

This resource is one of several outputs from Phase 2 of the FSELI, which together presage a mixed-methods evaluation design that runs from late 2026 through 2029. That evaluation is built around contribution analysis: the FSELI is deliberately seeking to understand how and why holistic CLD works, rather than to produce a single attribution estimate. It focuses on a small number of “causal hotspots”—points along the pathway from programs to impact where the evidence base is thinnest, and the learning opportunity is greatest.

The measurement resource is built in the same spirit. It is offered as guidance, not orthodoxy, and we will improve it as the evaluation generates new evidence. If you work on programs in this space, or on other programs that seek to build collective action, better governance, and trust, we would welcome your reactions. 

Try the resource

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