The Challenge
Country offices are asked a deceptively simple question: what did our portfolio achieve? When budgets tighten, the question gets sharper. Leaders need to know which investments to protect, which to rethink and what to say about each — and every answer has to hold up when someone asks how we know.
Answering honestly is hard. The evidence sat in three places. Partner reports described activities and outputs. National surveys and routine systems showed how each sector was moving. Interviews held the context that connected the two. When sources disagreed — on immunization or nutrition coverage, for example — there was no standard way to show it.
Building an account by hand took the better part of a year per cycle, and program officers were already stretched. Every new reporting request competed with managing the grants themselves.
Leadership wanted one defensible view of how each sector was moving and what the foundation’s investments had plausibly contributed — without claiming more than the evidence could carry.
Our Solution
How is the sector moving, with or without us?
We built sector pages for maternal and child health, family planning, immunization and nutrition from national surveys and routine data, with pages on cross-cutting enablers to follow. Where sources disagree, the pages show them side by side, with the reason, rather than quietly choosing one.
What did the portfolio plausibly add?
We analyzed every priority investment from its documents, and interviews with grantee teams test and correct the picture. Each claim is graded: independently evidenced, verified by the program officer, or self-reported. A reader can see at once which claims rest on independent evidence and which on a partner’s own account.
Simpler on request.
An early version of the account was more elaborate than leadership needed. When leaders asked for less complexity, we pared it back to the two questions, until a director could carry it into a meeting.
A living account the office owns.
The account sits in a dashboard under a single monitoring and evaluation plan owned by the office, and refreshes as new survey rounds and reports land. The asks of program officers stay light: quarterly notes from their grantee conversations and an annual report.
AI changes the cost, not the standard of proof.
Rules-based automation does the volume work — extraction, structuring, refresh. AI drafts the first pass of each account. A named consultant reviews every claim before it reaches the client. The sector-page refresh now runs on scheduled pipelines in beta, designed to cut repeat effort by about three-quarters.
Business Impact
- One account of results. The first office took a single, evidence-graded account across its 28 priority investments into its strategy review, shared with sector leads as one source.
- A method that travels. A second country office, with one of the foundation’s largest portfolios, runs the same method alongside the measurement systems Evalueserve built with it.
- A rhythm the office can sustain. Annual grantee interviews and scheduled refreshes replace a rebuild every year.
- Lower cost per account. Sixty grant-level accounts completed by hand now train the AI first pass, so each new account takes less analyst time while expert review stays.
What it does not claim. | Impact accounting describes plausible contribution, graded by evidence. It does not attribute outcomes to single grants, and it does not replace a formal evaluation where one is needed.
What's Next
The office now brings Evalueserve into its strategy cycle as a thought partner, and an AI-assisted cycle for partner performance is in development. Both keep the same standard: every claim graded, every figure traceable to its source.
Talk to One of Our Experts
Get in touch today to find out about how Evalueserve can help you improve your processes, making you better, faster and more efficient.
Overview & Impact
A global philanthropic foundation needed a clearer, evidence-based view of its portfolio’s contribution to national development outcomes. Evalueserve developed an AI-assisted impact accounting solution that integrates sector data, partner reports, and investment evidence into a unified dashboard, helping leadership assess results, inform funding decisions, and streamline reporting.