By Raquel Kasham Daniel
“We reached 10,000 girls.”
I have said those words before. So have many of us working in the social impact sector. And there is nothing inherently wrong with the statement. Reach matters. It tells us whether our work got to the people we intended to serve, and in a sector where resources are often limited, being able to demonstrate scale is important. Funders want to know how far their resources went, organisations want to demonstrate their effectiveness, and practitioners need to understand whether their programmes are reaching the people they were designed for.
But over the years, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with how easily we move from talking about reach to talking about impact, as though the two are interchangeable. They are not. Reaching 10,000 girls tells me that 10,000 girls encountered an intervention. It does not, by itself, tell me what happened to those girls because of it.
Did they learn something that changed the way they think or behave? Did a barrier they were facing actually disappear? Did they become more confident? Did they stay in school? Did their choices or opportunities change? And perhaps most importantly, did any of that change last?
These questions are much harder to answer than “How many people did you reach?” Perhaps that is one reason we don’t always ask them.
The social impact sector has become very good at counting. We count people reached, people trained, communities engaged, workshops delivered, materials distributed and campaigns conducted. These numbers are useful, but they primarily tell us about our activities. They tell us what we did and how many people came into contact with it. What they do not necessarily tell us is whether the problem we set out to address became smaller.
A girl can attend a workshop without learning something that stays with her. A child can receive educational materials and still struggle in school. A community can participate in a sensitisation programme and continue facing the same problem months later. The intervention happened, the numbers went up, and the activity can be marked as completed. But the more important question remains: what actually changed?
I have seen this distinction play out in my own work with children and girls. Through Beyond the Classroom Foundation, we have implemented programmes that address some of the barriers that prevent girls from fully participating in education. One example is Project Red Robots, through which we have worked with girls around menstrual health education and access to menstrual products.
It would be easy to tell the story of that programme through numbers: the number of girls reached, the number of schools involved, the number of menstrual products distributed or the number of sessions conducted. Those numbers matter and should be documented. But they are not the entire story.
The more meaningful questions are what happened because of the intervention. Did a girl understand menstruation better than she did before? Did she become more comfortable seeking information or asking questions? Did she learn how to manage her period safely? Did access to menstrual products reduce the number of days she missed school? Did the conversation change how teachers or parents responded to menstruating girls?
The menstrual product is an output. The education session is an activity. But a girl being able to manage her period with dignity and remain engaged in school is much closer to the change we were actually trying to create.
That distinction has changed the way I think about impact. Working with children has made it difficult for me to look at a programme only through the numbers because behind every number is a child whose life continues long after our project ends. She is not a project. She is not an outcome indicator. She is a person whose future cannot be reduced to our programme’s reporting period.
If we say that we have impacted her life, then I think we should be willing to tell a little more of the story. Perhaps she is now attending school more consistently because a barrier that once kept her away has been removed. Perhaps she understands her body better and no longer feels ashamed to ask questions. Perhaps she has developed the confidence to speak up. Perhaps her parents have changed how they think about investing in her education. Perhaps something has changed within the system around her.
These changes may not always produce the most impressive numbers, but they are the reason the numbers should matter in the first place.
This is why I think we also need to be more careful about our use of the word “impact.” It has become one of the most frequently used words in the development sector. Almost everything is described as impactful. But when everything is impact, the word begins to lose its meaning.
There is a difference between conducting an activity and producing an outcome. There is a difference between reaching someone and changing something for them. And there is a difference between creating a momentary improvement and contributing to a change that can actually be sustained.
None of this means that we should stop measuring reach. We absolutely should. Reach tells us something important. If a programme designed for 10,000 girls only reaches 500, that matters. If an intervention intended for a particular community never reaches the people most affected by the problem, that matters too.
But reach should be the beginning of the conversation, not the conclusion.
After asking how many people we reached, we should be asking what changed, for whom, by how much, and for how long. We should be interested in whether the change continued after the project ended and whether the people we intended to serve actually experienced the improvement we hoped to create.
Those questions require more than a registration sheet or attendance list. They require listening, follow-up, thoughtful programme design and better measurement. Sometimes they also require the humility to discover that something we thought was working did not work as well as we imagined.
I think that humility is important. Social impact should not be about proving that everything we do is successful. It should be about becoming increasingly honest about what creates meaningful change and what does not.
This matters particularly in a world where resources for social development are limited and the needs are enormous. Every naira, dollar, volunteer hour and institutional resource committed to a social problem represents an opportunity cost. We therefore have a responsibility to ask not only whether we are doing good, but whether we are doing the kind of good that actually addresses the problem.
Perhaps this is also where charity fits into the conversation.
On International Day of Charity, we rightly celebrate generosity. We celebrate people who give their money, time, skills and resources to make life better for someone else. But generosity also deserves a harder question: What does our giving make possible?
If we give a girl a school uniform, does it simply mean that one more uniform was distributed, or does it help remove a barrier to her education? If we provide learning materials, do we stop at distribution, or do we remain interested in whether those materials improved her learning experience? If we fund a programme, do we only celebrate how many people participated, or do we remain interested in what happened to them afterwards?
The answers matter because the point of charity cannot simply be that we gave. The point should be that something became possible because we gave: a child stayed in school, a girl gained confidence, a family made a different decision, a young person gained an opportunity, or a community became better equipped to solve its own problems.
That, to me, is where the conversation about charity becomes a conversation about impact.
We do not need to abandon reach. We need to put it in perspective. We need to become better at distinguishing between the people we touched and the change that occurred because we did.
Because ultimately, the most important question is not simply, “How many people did we reach?”
It is: “Are their lives different because we showed up?”
Reach is important.
But reach is not the same thing as impact.
