Logical Framework

The Logical Framework (often called the "logframe") is a structured planning and management tool used to design, monitor, and evaluate projects. It originated in the late 1960s when Fry Associates developed it for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and it has since been adopted by most major donors and multilateral agencies, including the European Commission, the UK's FCDO (formerly DFID), GIZ, the World Bank, UNDP, and many NGOs.

At its core, the logframe is a matrix — typically 4×4 — that lays out a project's intervention logic in rows and columns:

• Rows describe the hierarchy of objectives: Goal (or Impact), Purpose (or Outcome), Outputs, and Activities.
• Columns capture, for each level, the Narrative Summary, Objectively Verifiable Indicators (OVIs), Means of Verification (MoV), and Assumptions (external conditions outside the project's control).

The underlying theory is an "if-then" causal chain: if activities are completed and assumptions hold, then outputs will be delivered; if outputs are delivered, then the purpose will be achieved; and so on up to the goal. This vertical logic forces designers to make their theory of change explicit and testable.

For researchers and MUN delegates, logframes are useful artifacts because they reveal how an implementing agency intends a policy to work, what it considers measurable, and where it expects risk. Reading a project's logframe alongside its evaluation reports often exposes gaps between planned indicators and actual results.

Critics — notably Des Gasper and Rosalind Eyben — argue that logframes can impose rigidity, privilege measurable outputs over harder-to-quantify social change, and discourage adaptive management. Partly in response, donors have introduced variants such as the Results Framework, Theory of Change diagrams, and "adaptive" or "doing development differently" approaches, though the logframe remains a standard deliverable in most grant applications.