Date: Monday, September 7, 2026
From left to right: Kenneth Chomba, Chris Kif, and Maria Selde
Hi. We’re Kenneth Chomba, Network Coordinator at the African Coaching Network (ACN); Chris Kif, Co-Director at Sauti Bridge; and Maria Selde of Humanity United, whose team has accompanied ACN’s work as a learning partner. Between us, we support and evaluate social movements across Africa, work that rarely stays still long enough for a tidy programme cycle.
Complexity scientists, systems thinkers, and champions of developmental evaluation have warned us that linear frameworks, like traditional logframes, clash with reality in volatile environments. Movements are complex adaptive systems; they don’t sit still when programs and data collection are treated as separate, sequential tracks. The work and the meaning of the work happen at the same time, often in the same breath, and a framework built for one doesn’t always serve the other. Here is a story about what that looks like in practice, from inside our own evaluation.
As ACN turns a decade old, we faced the question every long-running network faces: How do you know what a decade of work has meant? A conventional review asks for numbers: trainings delivered, campaigns supported, coaches retained. We had those numbers, but they describe program outputs, and ACN is a living system in thirteen countries spanning five languages, a community of people who found each other doing this work long before it had a name
So we evaluated ourselves differently. Instead of a logframe review, we used Roots, Branches, and Fruits, or RBF, a framework that treats a movement’s life the way a living thing grows rather than the way a project gets delivered. Roots asks what let our coaches tell the truth about what they were living through, often for the first time. Branches asks where that truth travelled once it was safe to speak, into new alliances, new rooms we hadn’t planned to enter. Fruits asks what became possible only when both had held.
What that process surfaced wasn’t only the wins. It surfaced what we’ve started calling the Resilience Tax, the toll absorbed, quietly and often unobserved, by whoever holds a network together through repression, funding cycles, and grief.
RBF has a name for this part of the work, the Bitter Harvest, the truths a movement must sit with honestly before it can move on. For us, that meant admitting things a funder report never asks about: the burnout carried by a small core of people, the cost of holding a family-style network together for a decade. Naming it honestly didn’t slow us down. It was what let us imagine our next ten years with clarity.
In the fields of peacebuilding evaluation and research in conflict-affected environments, practitioners have long grappled with how standard metrics miss the invisible labor of safety, trauma-informed accompaniment, and social cohesion. Organisations and networks operating in contexts of fragility know that quantitative outputs (like training delivered or documents produced) frequently mask the profound human infrastructure required just to keep a community breathing.
Evaluating in unstable conditions requires a shift in mindset over new tools. And more often, the work is not fitting neatly within a programme because of such fragility. This is therefore an invitation to consider understanding change as spiral movement – where the untidy work and its meaning belong together.
So, we leave you with a question: how can your evaluation capture more than the wins, counting what it costs to get there, beyond the money and the budget lines?
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