Logframe or Theory of Change? You Almost Certainly Need Both

The question comes up in almost every design workshop we run, and it is usually framed as a choice: should we do a logframe or a theory of change? Behind it sits a real anxiety — someone has been told logframes are outdated and linear, someone else has been told theories of change are unaccountable diagrams, and the proposal is due on Friday.

The framing is wrong. They answer different questions, and in most organisations the honest answer is that you need both, built in a specific order.

What each one is actually for

A theory of change explains how and why change is expected to happen. It is built backwards from the long-term outcome through the preconditions that must be in place, with the assumptions on each link written down and open to challenge. Its job is explanatory. It is the document you argue about.

A logframe summarises what you will deliver, how it will be verified, and what must hold true, in a four-column matrix. Its job is contractual. It is the document you are held to.

One is a model. The other is a commitment. Asking which to use is like asking whether to have a design or a contract.

The order matters more than the choice

Build the theory of change first. Derive the logframe from it.

Done in that order, the logframe’s assumptions column writes itself, because the assumption elicitation already happened. The outcome row is defensible, because the pathway showed which precondition the intervention can realistically own. The indicators sit at the right level, because the pathway distinguishes what you deliver from what changes as a result.

Done in the reverse order — logframe first, theory of change added later because a funder asked for one — you get what the sector produces in volume: a diagram of the logframe with arrows drawn between the boxes. Every box is something the project does. No box represents anything another actor must do or anything about the world that must be true. That is a workplan in a nicer layout, and any assessor who reads theories of change for a living will recognise it in about ten seconds.

In fifteen years of running M&E across East Africa, the most common single cause of a programme quietly losing its way in year two is that nobody ever wrote down the assumptions. The activities happened. The outputs were delivered. The outcome did not move, and by the time anyone asked why, the belief that connected the two had never been recorded, so there was nothing to check.

Which one the funder wants

The pattern is fairly consistent.

Institutional grant compliance wants the logframe. European Commission applications through EuropeAid and DG INTPA generally require one as an annex. GIZ, UN agencies, the African Development Bank and IFAD all work with them. In Kenya, the national M&E guidance under CIMES ships a logframe template as Annex A10, which makes it the expected artefact for county programme planning too.

Foundations and bilateral strategy processes want the theory of change. FCDO business cases include one and assess its quality. The Gates Foundation, Comic Relief, Ford, Hewlett and Global Affairs Canada all use theory of change as a core instrument.

Most organisations of any size are applying into both worlds in the same year. Maintaining one coherent theory of change per programme, from which project logframes are cut, is much less work than maintaining a parallel set of unrelated documents — and it is the only way the two stay consistent when a reviewer reads them side by side.

When one of them genuinely does not apply

Two honest exceptions.

Skip the elaborate theory of change for a small, well-understood, single-strand intervention where the causal claim is not in dispute. If you are rehabilitating a borehole, a theory of change adds ceremony, not clarity. Write the logframe, write the assumptions properly, and get on with it.

Skip the logframe where results genuinely cannot be specified in advance — advocacy, coalition-building, systems change, work whose success depends on a policy window nobody controls. There the right instrument is a theory of change to frame the intent and outcome harvesting to find out what actually changed. But be clear-eyed: this has to be agreed with the funder at contracting. You cannot accept a target-based contract and then explain at evaluation that results were unforeseeable.

A note on the third document

If you work at portfolio or strategy level, there is a third artefact that gets confused with both: the results framework. It is hierarchical like a theory of change and results-focused like a logframe, but it is a strategy artefact — goal, development objectives, intermediate results — covering many interventions over a strategy period, and it deliberately excludes activities.

The clean arrangement in an organisation running several programmes: one results framework for the strategy, one theory of change per programme, one logframe per funded project, with each project’s logframe mapping upward into an intermediate result. When that mapping cannot be drawn, you have learned something useful about your portfolio.

What to do on Friday

If the proposal is due and you have neither: spend half a day on the backwards mapping with the people who know the context, write the assumptions down, then cut the logframe from it. Half a day of pathway work produces a materially better logframe than two days of filling in the matrix directly, and it produces a document you can defend at inception rather than one you have to quietly rewrite.

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Monival’s results module holds result nodes at impact, outcome, output and activity level with their assumptions and indicators, displayed as a grouped logframe matrix. Theory of change facilitation is delivered by Sibasi as consulting rather than in the product — see the explainer for exactly what that means.