A logframe you can fill in on a Tuesday.
Four levels, seven columns, and a worked example from a real-shaped agriculture programme so the empty grid is not the first thing you meet. Free, no email wall, yours to modify.
Download it
| Logframe | The blank grid: four levels, seven columns, rows to fill. |
| Example | The same grid completed for a smallholder resilience programme. |
| Guide | What each level and column means, and where people get stuck. |
Free to use, copy and modify, with or without attribution. This is Karagem's template, laid out to match what donors commonly ask for — it is not an official document from USAID, the EU, the World Bank or FCDO, so check your own award papers for the exact format your agreement requires.
The column everybody leaves till last
Means of verification is filled in at the end, usually in a hurry, usually with the word "survey". That is the column an evaluator reads first, because it is the only one that says whether the indicator above it can actually be measured.
Write it before you write the target. If the means of verification is "annual household survey" and you have not budgeted for an annual household survey, the target is fiction and it is better to find that out in the design workshop than in year three.
Assumptions are not disclaimers
An assumption is a condition outside your control that has to hold for the level below to produce the level above. "Rainfall is within the normal range." "The county government keeps the extension officers in post."
It belongs in the logframe because it is the thing you monitor without controlling — and when it fails, it is the honest first line of the explanation for why an output did not become an outcome. A row that says "sufficient funding" is not an assumption, it is a hedge.
Where the logframe stops being a document
A logframe is a one-page table that then has to be tracked for three years, which is why most of them are written once and opened twice. The columns that matter — baseline, target, actual — need a value against a date, every quarter, disaggregated by whoever the funder cares about.
That is what the software underneath this template does: every row here becomes an indicator with a target and a series, and the quarterly report is generated from it rather than reassembled by hand.
The other two
Indicator tracking table
Fifteen columns, in the order a reviewer reads them, with the two most-forgotten ones included: per cent of programme time elapsed, and the deviation narrative you owe for anything more than ten points off.
Data quality assessment checklist
Fifteen questions across the five dimensions, each paired with the specific document or record an assessor will ask to see. Use it as a self-assessment a quarter before the real one, when there is still time to fix what it finds.