Attacks on aid workers are reaching record levels, making duty of care a major legal and compliance obligation for NGOs and CSOs. This article explains how to map and fund safety costs with donors, then trace every decision and expense. With 5 actionable steps for a manageable, auditable system, from headquarters to the field.
2025 was the deadliest year ever recorded for aid workers, and duty of care is becoming a compliance issue scrutinized by donors, insurers and courts. This article sets out the legal foundations of the duty of care, the components of a robust system, and how to document and fund it. The result: demonstrable safety from headquarters to the field.
A logframe says what the project promises; a MEAL plan says how, when and by whom each promise will be measured. This template details the indicator reference sheet column by column, the data flow from collection to decision, the calendar of MEAL events and the accountability and learning components. It closes with the classic mistakes and how to keep the plan alive after the proposal is signed.
Agile is tempting in volatile contexts, and donors now talk about adaptive management. But a signed logframe and budget cannot be re-prioritised every sprint. A practitioner's view of what transfers, what does not, and the PCM-plus-agile hybrid that holds up at audit.
What does a MEAL officer actually do? This article sets out the role in one paragraph, its responsibilities in five blocks, the hard and soft skills that matter, the career path from assistant to coordinator, and a five-question interview grid. It also explains why Excel alone is a risk and how an integrated MEAL module changes the officer's day.
Most NGO project manager job descriptions say nothing about the donor rules and tools the person will actually run. This article gives a complete template: responsibilities in five blocks, hard and soft skills, profile, tools, a five-question interview grid and honest compensation guidance. Written for recruiters and candidates alike.
MEAL stands for Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning: the system an NGO builds to know what its projects deliver, answer to the people it serves and learn from the evidence. This guide explains what each letter produces, how MEAL differs from M&E, where it sits in the project cycle and the logframe, and what a working system is made of. It also covers roles, donor and auditor expectations, the classic failures and the tools, from Excel to MEAL software.
Theory of change and logframe are not rivals: one explains why change should happen, the other commits to what will be delivered and measured. This article compares the two, says when to use which, and walks through five steps to derive a logframe from a theory of change. It closes with three common mistakes and how to keep both documents alive during implementation.
Logframe, workplan, budget by donor line with commitments, risk register, MEAL plan, donor narrative and financial report, closure checklist: the seven templates every NGO project needs, with the fields each must contain and the classic mistake that makes it useless. Then why seven disconnected files break once you manage more than a handful of grants, and how one linked structure replaces them.