Activities cannot be connected to documented changes in decisions, behaviour, or institutional response.
The problem category
Visibility is not influence.
A programme can be busy, visible, and well reported yet leave a basic question unanswered: what changed, and what evidence supports that conclusion? AGC calls this the Proof Gap.
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The definition
The distance between doing the work and proving what changed.
The gap appears when activity, claim, evidence, and adoption do not line up. Communications can expose the mismatch. Repairing it may require changes to the claim, the evidence, the programme logic, or the way partners work.
Recognition
What the gap looks like inside an organization
Partners describe the same programme’s influence in materially different ways.
Reach, engagement, and visibility are treated as evidence of adoption.
Evidence exists, but it does not support the programme’s central claims.
The team cannot name the decision or behaviour it is trying to influence.
Public language is stronger than the evidence available to defend it.
Diagnostic logic
Five questions expose the gap.
The diagnostic starts with the claim the organization needs others to accept or use. It then tests what supports that claim, how the expected decision moves, and where the account becomes uncertain.
What did the organization actually do?
What does it say changed as a result?
What evidence supports that claim?
Who used, repeated, or acted on the idea?
What could be affected by how the claim is communicated?
The cost
When the gap remains unresolved
Teams compensate with more outputs, denser reporting, and stronger language. The volume increases while the evidentiary weakness remains.
Partners defend different versions of the same achievement. A shared programme becomes institutionally fragmented at the moment it needs to present a coherent account.
Decision-makers receive claims they cannot confidently repeat or use. The idea is heard, but it does not enter a decision, policy, plan, or routine.
Political, donor, and stakeholder relationships become more exposed because the organization has not agreed what it can credibly say.