Many donor funded projects in Ghana are designed and reported using a logical framework, usually called a logframe. Officer and coordinator adverts mention donor reporting, indicators and results again and again, and nearly all of that rests on the logframe. You may not write one in your first job, but you will need to read one and collect the information it asks for.
The idea: a chain of results
A logframe links what the project does to the change it hopes to cause, in a chain of levels:
- Activities: the things the team does. Drill a borehole, train a committee.
- Outputs: what those activities directly produce. One working borehole; ten committee members trained.
- Outcome: the change the outputs should lead to. Households use safe water all year.
- Goal (or impact): the bigger, longer term change the project contributes to. Fewer cases of waterborne illness in the community.
Read it as a chain of "if... then": if we do these activities, then we get these outputs; if we have these outputs, then the outcome follows, and so on.