Are Your Investments Actually Strengthening Community? 

Development donors face an uncomfortable truth: measuring project outputs is not the same as measuring community impact.

Most organisations track what they deliver – wells dug, workshops conducted, loans disbursed – in ways that satisfy reporting requirements and demonstrate activity but reveal little about whether communities are actually stronger, more cohesive, or better equipped to sustain progress after funding ends.

Understanding real community-level impact is critical for sustainable development.

The Measurement Gap

Consider a typical livelihoods programme where success metrics might include number of participants trained, businesses launched, or income increases recorded. These are valuable indicators, yet they tell us nothing about whether the programme improved trust between community members, strengthened local governance capacity, or built the social fabric that determines whether gains persist.

Research consistently shows that communities with stronger social cohesion, better governance, and more equitable resource distribution achieve better development outcomes and sustain them, while interventions that ignore these foundational factors often see gains evaporate once external support withdraws.

Donors increasingly recognise this challenge, and the question is not whether community-level impact matters, but how to measure it systematically across diverse contexts.

Traditional assessment approaches struggle to capture these outcomes because:

• Bespoke community assessments are expensive and time-intensive
• Results rarely compare across projects or regions
• Baseline data – where it exists – is often inconsistent

The result is a persistent gap: organisations invest heavily in programs designed to strengthen communities, yet lack reliable evidence of of whether those efforts succeed.

An Alternative Approach: Measuring Community Strength

Effective community impact measurement requires a framework grounded in empirical research – one that identifies which factors actually determine community resilience and social cohesion.

The Institute for Economics & Peace has spent over a decade analysing what makes societies peaceful and resilient, drawing on more than 50,000 data points across 163 countries to identify eight interconnected pillars that underpin sustainable peace and development, ranging from well-functioning governance and equitable resource distribution to levels of human capital and acceptance of others’ rights.

Translating this framework to community level creates a standardised yet locally relevant approach to measuring what programmes often aim to achieve but struggle to demonstrate.

For donors, this shift offers practical benefits:

• Comparable data across projects enables portfolio-level analysis of what works
• Baseline measurements identify where interventions will have greatest impact, and
• Longitudinal tracking demonstrates change over time

Together, this provides evidence that supports both accountability and strategic learning.  

The Community Strength Barometer

IEPs Community Strength Barometer (CSB) applies this methodology through a rapid assessment tool that captures community perceptions across all eight foundational factors. The CSB provides: 

• Actionable intelligence: Connect program activities to measurable community outcomes
• Portfolio-level analysis: Compare results across projects and regions
• Baseline and longitudinal tracking: Identify where interventions can have the greatest impact and monitor change over time
• Evidence for donors: Support accountability, learning and strategic decision-making

For organisations serious about impact rather than activity, the question is no longer whether to measure community strength, but how quickly they can start. Tools like the CSB offer a data-driven and cost-effective approach to connect programmes to measurable community-level impact.

Explore how the Community Strength Barometer can strengthen your impact measurement at CSB: See how it works.