Colmeal is a structured, community-led approach — not a participation tool. Communities are the central agents of their own lives. Through Colmeal, communities assess the root causes of their own challenges, design and track their own change, generate their own evidence, and hold institutions accountable — on their own terms. Implemented across 9 countries and 120+ communities.
Learn MoreGood MEAL doesn’t just measure projects — it generates evidence that communities and organisations can actually use. Salanga brings expertise, practical tools, and capacity building to make monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning meaningful: locally grounded and designed to inform real decisions.
Learn moreStrong programs begin with honest questions about context, power, and whose knowledge is centred. Salanga provides consultancy and coaching on project design, theory of change, and proposal development. We also support organisations to operationalise localisation within their programming: not as a compliance exercise, but as a genuine shift in how decisions get made and who makes them.
Learn moreAt Salanga, we believe that communities are the central agents of their own lives.
Too often we saw communities invited to participate in processes they didn’t shape, toward goals they didn’t set, measured against indicators that didn’t reflect what mattered to them. Genuine goodwill. Structurally extractive outcomes.
The question that drove us was: what would it take for communities to lead their own analysis, generate their own evidence, and engage institutions on their own terms?
The answer became Colmeal — a structured approach for community-led governance and learning, now implemented across 9 countries and 120+ communities. A process communities own: assessing root causes, designing their own change, building evidence, and holding institutions accountable.
What we’ve learned along the way is that when communities have the right structures — not just the invitation — remarkable things follow. Community elders entering budget discussions for the first time. Institutions independently adopting community-led methods without external prompting. Community-generated data surfacing what official records missed, and prompting governments to redesign how they plan.
These aren’t outcomes we designed in advance. They’re what happens when communities are in the lead.
Salanga is a for-profit social enterprise. Our team spans countries, cultures, and lived experiences. We work alongside implementing organisations, funders, and governments who are ready to put community agency at the centre — not as a principle, but as a practice. That belief shapes everything we do.
Before [Salanga’s Colmeal] workshop, I had the misconception that the whole work was ours and we would do it. But after, I realised the whole process will be managed by the community; we will just support from behind.
Colmeal is something that has heavy sustainability potential. It can significantly outlast the project, it can make the communities to really be much more self-sufficient than we currently think that we can do as NGOs.
Salanga helped us to position ourselves as thought leaders in the digital innovation space, particularly through the drafting of the Learning Brief produced in the summer of 2025. This involved a series of structured discussions on key aspects of the project, which allowed for important moments of reflection about how we work and why.
When you go to the community, your mind should be a blank sheet of paper, like a clean white paper. You have to be blank in order for you to learn from the community also.
Our team has worldwide reach. We have supported over 50 projects located in over 35 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.
