What does meaningful M&E support look like when it extends beyond producing a baseline and a final evaluation report?
For Nation Builder, our two-year engagement with Lungisisa Indlela Village (LIV) offered an opportunity to explore exactly that question. LIV is a South African faith-based nonprofit organisation dedicated to supporting orphaned and vulnerable children through holistic, family-based care, education, healthcare and skills development. With a broader vision of building sustainable communities and creating opportunities for people to thrive, LIV also uses social enterprise and business initiatives to generate employment and support the long-term sustainability of its work.
Nation Builder was appointed as LIV’s independent M&E provider for the Jobs Fund-funded LIV Community Clothing Project – Scale & Replication. The project was designed to expand LIV’s clothing retail, warehousing and distribution infrastructure as a platform for job creation and sustainable livelihoods, bringing together three interdependent components: the expansion of LIV’s retail and warehouse operations, the Umthombo Marketplace Programme, which supports unemployed women to generate income, and the LIV Internship Programme, which provides young people with structured workplace experience.
Nation Builder supported the project from inception and the formative baseline through ongoing M&E support, Theory of Change development, endline data collection, summative evaluation and project closeout. The engagement was ultimately about more than measuring whether targets had been achieved. It was about building an evidence base that could help LIV understand what changed, why it changed, what remained challenging, and what should happen next.
Starting with a baseline and using it to shape the journey
The project began in April 2024 with an ambitious integrated model comprising three interconnected pillars: Scale and Replication, the Umthombo Marketplace Programme, and the LIV Internship Programme. Nation Builder’s initial scope included a formative baseline, continuous M&E support and a summative evaluation. The formative baseline, completed in July 2024, provided an early picture of the project and generated nine recommendations for strengthening implementation and measurement. Importantly, the baseline was not treated as a once-off deliverable. Its findings became a reference point for the work that followed.
The baseline identified opportunities around areas such as trauma-relief support, emotional intelligence, career guidance, differentiated support, mentorship and digital skills. It also highlighted practical improvements needed in the evaluation process itself. For example, the original baseline questionnaire was simplified after lessons from field administration. The baseline therefore became the beginning of an ongoing learning cycle rather than the end of a data-collection exercise.
Building on and strengthening LIV’s Theory of Change together
In early 2025, Nation Builder facilitated a two-day participatory Theory of Change review workshop with LIV Central, LIV Invest and the LIV Community Clothing Project – Scale & Replication programme teams. The process built on LIV’s existing Theories of Change, using the workshop to critically review, clarify and strengthen the underlying logic and pathways of change. Rather than developing the frameworks from scratch, the workshop helped the teams refine how activities and outputs connected to short- and medium-term outcomes and longer-term change. The resulting revised Theories of Change provided clearer pathways for the Umthombo Marketplace and LIV Internship programmes, while strengthening the teams’ shared understanding of how the programmes were expected to contribute to change.
A key achievement was ownership. Rather than receiving an externally developed Theory of Change, the programme teams co-authored the frameworks. By project closeout, LIV staff were using Theory of Change language to describe their own programmes, an important indication that the frameworks had become practical management tools rather than documents created solely for reporting purposes.
M&E as an ongoing partnership
One of the quieter achievements of the engagement was consistency. Across 26 months, Nation Builder and LIV maintained a sustained rhythm of engagement, with more than 28 documented M&E catch-up sessions, three in-person Durban visits, quarterly reporting support and regular coordination throughout implementation. This kept M&E connected to the programme as it evolved.
The project itself changed significantly during implementation. It exceeded several original targets, expanded geographically, and underwent operational changes that affected stock supply, beneficiary reach, and data collection. The M&E approach therefore had to adapt alongside the project.
Nation Builder supported LIV with areas including quarterly reporting, indicator definitions, data-quality practices, instrument design and interpretation of emerging evidence. This was particularly important because the project did not remain exactly as it had been designed on paper. The M&E process needed to remain responsive to adaptive management in line with implementation realities.
Strengthening the evidence base
One of the clearest examples of this adaptive approach was the evolution of the evidence strategy. The formative baseline relied on a convenience sample. As the project developed, Nation Builder and LIV moved towards broader population-level evidence, supported by audited administrative data. LIV’s diligence in capturing, maintaining, and strengthening programme data throughout implementation made this possible, providing an increasingly robust foundation for analysis and reporting.
For the Umthombo Marketplace Programme, individual-level sales records became an important source of longitudinal evidence. For the Internship Programme, pre- and post-programme competency tracking helped assess changes in areas such as workplace readiness, personal development and job-related competencies. The final summative evaluation combined quantitative and qualitative evidence, including administrative records, surveys, competency assessments, key informant interviews and focus groups.
Three independent partners supported the fieldwork: Wakamoso Africa, which conducted the endline WhatsApp survey; Enzakahle Consulting, which conducted the qualitative fieldwork; and Uhuru Development Consulting, which supported data quality assurance. Piloting also became an important part of the process. Site visits and field testing helped the team refine the data collection instruments, including making questions more accessible and incorporating lessons around isiZulu-language interviewing and the need to explain concepts such as savings groups in plain language. The result was an evidence base that could tell a more complete story than any single data source could provide.
What did the project achieve?
By project close, the LIV Community Clothing Project had exceeded several of its original targets. Across four cohorts, 495 women were trained against an original target of 200, while 25 interns completed the 12-month internship against a target of 20. The Scale and Replication pillar created 61 formal jobs: 41 permanent and 20 fixed-term. Among the women participating in Umthombo, 202 were confirmed in informal self-employment, with aggregate gross sales of approximately R5.54 million by endline. Mean self-reported monthly income among endline respondents increased from R1,371 to R3,521, while the proportion of women at or above the Upper-Bound Poverty Line increased from 32% at baseline to 89% at endline.
The evaluation also found evidence of change beyond income. 65% of women surveyed reported that their households were better off, while 91% felt that the programme support was worth their time. For the Internship Programme, the findings pointed to broad development across job competencies, personal development and workplace readiness. Of the 13 interns reached at the endline, four moved into permanent employment, three progressed to further education, and two entered career-aligned internships. These results demonstrate the scale of what the project achieved. But perhaps equally important were the findings about what made those results possible, and what threatened their sustainability.
Looking beyond outputs
One of the strongest lessons from the evaluation was the importance of distinguishing outputs from outcomes. The project could clearly demonstrate how many jobs had been created, how many women had been trained and how many interns had completed the programme. But the evaluation also asked what those achievements meant for the people involved. For example, women participating in Umthombo frequently pointed to discipline, record-keeping and mindset as important drivers of their progress, not simply access to stock or capital. Similarly, the Internship findings showed that completing a programme and developing workplace competencies did not automatically translate into successful transition into external employment. Confidence, job-search skills, interview readiness, supervisor relationships and the availability of structured transition support all influenced what happened after the internship. These findings reinforced an important M&E principle: counting delivery is necessary, but it is not enough to understand change.
What the project taught us
Several lessons emerged from the evaluation.
1. A mid-term learning point matters
The project did not include a formal mid-term assessment as part of the Jobs Fund’s requirements for this two-year project. However, the experience highlighted the value of building a deliberate learning and course-correction point into longer-term projects, even when the funder does not formally require it. A mid-point review led by the implementer could provide an opportunity to assess progress against objectives, revisit earlier recommendations, identify emerging challenges and agree on priorities for the remainder of the project. In this case, a deliberate mid-point reflection could have given LIV and the project team an additional opportunity to revisit the formative recommendations, assess what had been implemented, and agree on priorities for the remainder of the project.
2. Good data practice compounds over time
Rolling baseline data, individual sales tracking and longitudinal competency assessments significantly strengthened the final evaluation. The lesson is simple: the quality of a summative evaluation is heavily influenced by the quality of the monitoring system that precedes it. Evaluation should therefore not be treated as something that begins a few months before a project closes.
3. Contextualising measures of success
The project reinforced the importance of anchoring measures of success in participants’ starting points and lived realities. When evidence showed that the original minimum-wage-equivalence threshold did not adequately capture incremental progress from unstable or very low incomes, the primary benchmark was re-anchored to the Upper-Bound Poverty Line (UBPL), while the National Minimum Wage was retained as a higher, aspirational tier. This made progress from a zero or unstable income base more visible, while still recognising the importance of sustained, higher income levels.
Strong stakeholder buy-in for both the project and the investment made this adjustment possible. The Jobs Fund, as the project funder, was willing to revisit and re-anchor the measures of success with LIV, reflecting genuine belief in the project and its participants. This collaboration ensured that the evaluation measured what truly mattered and remained relevant to the context it was designed to serve. The experience shows that funder flexibility, combined with shared ownership of how success is defined, is central to producing evidence that is both credible and meaningful. Measures that reflect participants’ realities provide a fairer account of impact than fixed benchmarks applied in isolation.
4. Localising evaluation methods
The project also showed the value of adapting evaluation methods to participants’ context and preferences. WhatsApp was used for the endline survey because it was already part of many participants’ everyday and business lives, while interviews and focus groups were conducted in isiZulu and qualitative data collection included female facilitators. These choices created more accessible spaces for participation and enabled women to describe their experiences, challenges, and definitions of success in their own terms. Piloting the instruments with participants also helped the team identify practical and cultural considerations to incorporate into the final tools.
5. The value of partnerships
Finally, the project highlighted that evaluation can create value beyond producing findings. Nation Builder used the evaluation process to mentor emerging evaluators and create opportunities for young, female-led consultancies to contribute to fieldwork, qualitative data collection and independent data validation. This strengthened the project’s delivery capacity while also building skills and opportunities within the wider M&E sector.
From findings to recommendations
The final evaluation translated the evidence into eight recommendations linked to specific findings, lessons and responsible roles within LIV. These included recommendations to strengthen and diversify stock supply; improve post-training support for women traders; strengthen youth employment-transition support; develop a structured provincial replication framework; conduct an outcomes assessment of the formal employment pillar; introduce a growth-stage pathway for established traders; strengthen placement-site supervision for interns; and track fixed-term employees beyond the project period.
The closeout process also generated additional actions, including the recommendation that LIV appoint an internal M&E focal point to own the results framework, instruments, and open recommendations during the post-implementation year. This helped shift the project from “What did the evaluation find?” to “What will we do with what we found?”
What Nation Builder leaves behind
The end of the evaluation did not mean the end of the M&E infrastructure developed through the engagement. At closeout, Nation Builder handed over reusable tools and frameworks that LIV can carry into its next monitoring cycle. These include baseline and endline questionnaires, key informant and focus group guides in English and isiZulu, an adapted results framework and logframe, refreshed programme-level Theories of Change and a set of recommendations linked to responsible roles.
The closeout discussion also identified opportunities for the next phase, including strengthening measurement of household-level and mindset change, improving activity-level record-keeping, formalising mentorship pathways and ensuring that future evaluation evidence is shared back with the women, interns and communities who contributed their experiences.
A partnership rather than a compliance exercise
Looking back across two years, perhaps the most important lesson for Nation Builder is that effective M&E support is not simply about delivering technically sound reports. It is about staying close enough to implementation to understand context, creating enough structure to protect data quality, and remaining flexible enough to adapt when the programme changes. The LIV engagement required all three. The project experienced operational restructuring, rapid expansion, data-collection challenges and changes to its measurement approach. At the same time, it exceeded major participant and employment targets and generated evidence of meaningful changes in income, confidence, skills, household wellbeing and employment pathways.
Nation Builder’s role was to help make those changes visible, interrogate what sat behind them, and translate the evidence into learning for the next phase. The strongest outcome of the engagement may therefore not be the final evaluation report itself. It is the combination of evidence, systems, shared language and organisational learning that remains with LIV after the evaluation has closed. For us, that is what M&E support can look like at its best: not an exercise that happens around a programme, but a process that works alongside it from inception to closeout, from measurement to meaning.
