From Reporting to Learning: Making the Case for Mutual Accountability

For years, reporting has been the default language of accountability in the nonprofit sector. We track activities, submit indicators and fill in templates to show progress. But somewhere along the way, reporting became the goal, not the byproduct of learning. But as the sector moves toward localization and greater emphasis on power-sharing, it’s becoming clear that accountability cannot be sustained through reporting alone. If our systems are to serve both transparency and transformation, we must move from reporting to learning and build structures of mutual accountability, where communities, organizations, and funders share responsibility for understanding, adapting, and improving together.

So how exactly do we drive, achieve and sustain this shift? Let’s explore practical steps towards building a learning-centered accountability system.

A Shift in Mindset: Redefine Accountability as Shared Learning:

The first step in moving from reporting to mutual accountability is reimagining what accountability means. Accountability has been viewed as a vertical process, something submitted upward to satisfy and justify oversight. But genuine accountability is horizontal and mutual. It happens when every actor (communities, implementers and funders) shares responsibility for asking questions, making sense of data and applying what is learned. This cultural realignment creates the foundation for mutual accountability, where learning becomes the highest expression of responsibility.

Co-Design What “Accountability” Looks Like:

Driving this shift requires participation in defining it. If accountability is to be mutual, then its metrics, indicators and reporting structures must also be mutually constructed. When funders, implementing partners and the community co-design what success looks like, data becomes meaningful across all levels.This process encourages donors and NGOs to align reporting with local priorities while ensuring that communities become authors of their own evidence, not subjects of data collection.

Salanga’s CoLMEAL (Community-Led Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning) model has shown how this can work in practice as communities are now able to decide what indicators reflect their lived experience and ensure that what’s measured truly matters.

Build Learning into Every Stage of the Project Lifecycle:

The shift from reporting to learning won’t be achieved by adding one “lessons learned” slide at the end of a project. Instead, learning must be designed into the system from inception to closure. At the design stage, identify not only what will be measured but what will be learned and how reflection will happen. At the implementation stage, create structured moments for reflection like quarterly learning meetings that include both field teams and communities, mid-term reviews that ask what’s emerging, not only what’s achieved and rapid learning cycles that feed insights into real-time adaptation. At the reporting stage, shift focus from proof to progress, where reports should capture how teams have adapted, what communities have learned/taught them and how evidence is being applied. When learning is embedded in every phase, reporting becomes a natural extension of reflection not a separate or secondary task.

Strengthen Feedback Loops and Data Flow in All Directions:

Reporting culture traditionally moves data in one direction — upward.Learning culture requires data to move in all directions — upward, downward and outward. To achieve this, organizations must:

Return data to communities: Use visual tools, reflection sessions and simplified summaries to share findings.

Facilitate collective interpretation: Bring together communities, field teams and partners to discuss what the data means and what it implies for action.

Encourage peer learning: Share lessons laterally across regions, teams and partner networks.

Create Safe Spaces for Honest Reflection

One of the biggest barriers to learning is fear. In many situations, the pressure to “show results” overshadows the space to admit uncertainty or failure. This culture undermines learning and discourages truth-telling. To sustain mutual accountability, we must build psychological safety, environments where staff and partners can ask difficult questions and discuss what’s not working without fear of judgment. This means:

1. Shifting expectations and valuing adaptive management as a sign of responsiveness.
2. Sharing what changed and why, not just what succeeded.
3. Inviting communities to challenge assumptions and influence next steps.
   Learning cannot thrive in fear; it flourishes in trust.

Institutionalize Learning

Shifting from reporting to learning is not a one-time reform; it’s a continuous effort and to sustain it, we must institutionalize learning practices like:

1. Developing learning frameworks that guide teams on reflection and adaptation.
2. Investing in MEAL capacity-building that integrates participatory and community-led methods like CoLMEAL.
3. Document and share learning not as an afterthought but as a strategic output.

At Salanga, we see this in practice through CoLMEAL stories like community reflections from Uganda, the Philippines and Kenya that show how evidence has been used to reshape local decisions. These stories remind the sector that learning is not an internal exercise but a public good. Additionally, sustaining this shift by institutionalizing learning also requires leadership commitment by leaders continuously encouraging model curiosity, valuing vulnerability, and celebrating teams that learn courageously. When leadership embodies learning, the rest of the organization follows. 

Conclusion: Build Mutual Accountability as Culture Not Compliance

Ultimately, mutual accountability cannot be achieved through tools alone. It is a culture, built on continuous learning, transparency and curiosity and this culture should be nurtured at every level of the ecosystem because mutual accountability, when achieved, transforms not only how we measure impact but how we understand responsibility itself. It becomes less about proving and more about improving together.

The journey from reporting to learning is a journey towards collaboration and redefining accountability not as a vertical process of proof, but as a horizontal system of partnership. Reporting will always have its place, but it is learning that gives reporting life and when funders, organizations and communities learn together, accountability becomes not just mutual, but meaningful.

This is the promise of the shift we are called to lead:

1. From oversight to ownership.
2. From data extraction to data exchange.
3. From reporting to learning.

And in that transformation, we find the very heart of mutual accountability where everyone is both accountable for learning and accountable to one another.pact isn’t measured by how much data we gather but by how well it is measured by how well we listen, learn, and act on what communities share.