Why Proof to Progress Exists: When Impact Goes Unaccounted, Everyone Pays

Mission-driven organizations do remarkable work improving lives. Too often, that work goes unaccounted for, or accounted for wrongly. Weak monitoring systems, flawed evaluation, and limited capacity distort the picture in ways that cost communities, organizations, and donors alike.

  • Real impact goes understated, so organizations lose the credibility and funding their work has earned.
  • Impact gets overstated, misdirecting donor investment toward the wrong causes and the wrong amounts, and failing the communities the programs were meant to serve.
  • Unintended consequences, both positive and negative, go uncounted entirely.
  • The intersections across sectors, including health, climate, agriculture, and food security, stay invisible, so opportunities to strengthen one through another are missed.

That gap is why Nilu Rimal founded Proof to Progress: to help mission-driven organizations account for their work accurately and honestly, in a way that serves the people at the center of it.

 

Two decades of turning evidence into change

After more than two decades leading monitoring and evaluation for programs around the world, Nilu Rimal founded Proof to Progress to bring that experience – practical, rigorous, and right-sized – to mission-driven organizations working to change lives.

Foundational Phase (2002 - 2015)

Foundations in Infectious Diseases and Health Systems Strengthening. Nilu began her career in global health, building the monitoring and evaluation systems behind some of the era’s most urgent efforts — the prevention, care, and treatment of HIV/AIDS, and the prevention of TB and malaria. She established longitudinal patient tracking systems, evaluated the effectiveness of prevention and care programs, and contributed to behavioral surveillance surveys across the region. Her work spanned 18 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Expansion Phase (2016 and Beyond)

After more than two decades leading monitoring and evaluation for programs around the world, Nilu Rimal founded Proof to Progress to bring that experience — practical, rigorous, and right-sized — to mission-driven organizations working to change lives.

The Proof Behind Progress

KPI Dashboard

Project Performance Monitoring

KPI dashboards, indicator tracking, data quality, and MEL planning.

    • 65 indicator tracking systems
    • 200+ MEL plans developed (incl. BD proposals)
    • 58 data quality assessments
Program Evaluaton

Project Outcome and Impact Evaluation

Directing donor-mandated evaluations and spearheading learning-agenda-guided special studies across health, agriculture, food security, and multi-sector development portfolios worldwide.

  • 50+ donor-mandated end-to-end evaluations (baseline, midterm, final; quasi-experimental design) across 25+ projects in 18 countries — a combined portfolio of approximately $400M
  • 15 learning-agenda-guided special studies, including outcome harvesting, project effectiveness analysis, and most significant change analysis
Building Monitoring and Evaluation Capcity

Capacity Building

Building MEL capability at every level – from senior directors and field teams to the local organizations delivering the work – and creating the tools that make it last.

  • 300+ individuals trained and mentored across 25+ projects — MEL leads, associates, and field data collectors
  • 40+ community-based organizations, cooperatives, and local associations strengthened
  • 25+ curricula, guidebooks, toolkits, manuals, and job aids developed — including training curricula, DQA field guides, an M&E manual, collaborative improvement and social-network-analysis toolkits, and research and evaluation guidebooks

On a mission to evaluate, learn, and improve lives.

Nilu Rimal - Education and Training

  • M.A., Sociology & MBA
  • Lean Six Sigma Black Belt 
  • Instructional Design
  • Business Intelligence

Nilu specializes in complexity-aware and developmental evaluation — surfacing the unintended consequences, tipping points, and emergent patterns that conventional methods miss. Grounded in systems thinking and collaborative learning and adaptation, she treats programs as living systems, helping teams see what’s shifting and adapt in real time.

  • Systems thinking — connecting the parts to see how change really happens
  • Cultural sensitivity — evaluation shaped by context, built with the communities it serves
  • Rigor in the details — the precision that makes evidence hold up and decisions stick
  • Value to the client — Senior-level expertise, right-sized and scalable to your organization or project.
  • Dependable delivery — on time, at quality, every time
Scroll to Top