International Development NGOs Editing and Proofreading Services

An international development NGO writes upward to institutional donors in one language and works downward through partners and communities in another. The logframe submitted in London or Ottawa becomes, six months later, a set of indicators a field team is collecting because the contract requires it, sometimes at the expense of the work the indicators were meant to measure. The gap between the document and the delivery is where this sector's persistent problems live, and it is created at the proposal stage.

We edit what development organisations and their partners produce — proposals to institutional and bilateral donors, logical frameworks and results frameworks, theory of change documents, baseline and endline study reports, donor narrative reports and financial narrative, partner agreements and sub-grant documentation, localisation and partnership policies, safeguarding and PSEA policies and their local-language source text, country strategies and programme designs, monitoring, evaluation and learning frameworks, gender and inclusion analyses, exit and transition plans, and public communications and supporter material. Our editors work on the English source that partners will work from and that translators will render.

The logframe narrative is where a well-designed programme becomes an unworkable one. Indicators are chosen because they are measurable rather than because they matter, targets are set at proposal stage by someone without field knowledge, and the means of verification assumes records that partners do not keep. The result is a field team spending days a month producing numbers nobody uses. We work on these so each indicator is checked against whether the partner can actually collect it with existing systems, so means of verification names a document that will genuinely exist, so targets carry the assumption they rest on rather than appearing as commitments, and so the assumptions column is written as real risks with what would happen if they fail rather than as boilerplate. We also press on whether the output-to-outcome logic survives being read backwards: if every output is delivered, does the outcome actually follow, or is there a step nobody has funded? That question, asked at proposal stage, is worth more than any amount of reporting afterwards.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including proposals, partner information, safeguarding material and security-relevant detail. We are editors rather than development practitioners, and we offer no view on programme design, donor compliance or any evaluation finding. What we can do is make the source text clean for translation, the frameworks internally consistent, and the reporting honest about what happened.