A Minimum Viable Standard for Community-Level Impact Verification
Version 1.1 | June 2026 | Open-source, CC BY 4.0
The Verifiable Impact Standard (VIS) is a five-pillar, pass/fail, community-generated impact verification framework designed for international development contexts. It addresses a structural gap in existing frameworks: no current standard verifies what actually changed at the community level, cheaply enough for frontier-market deployment, and transparently enough for both village councils and institutional investors to trust.
VIS is:
- Project-level — not organisation-level certification
- Pass/fail — binary gates that resist gaming
- Community-generated — evidence produced at the point of impact
- Counting-based — a 0–100 score with zero analyst discretion
- Open-source — CC BY 4.0, free for any institution to adopt
Cost: $0.08 per beneficiary per year (vs $0.12 for conventional M&E)
| Pillar | Name | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Promise | Single-page community commitment, 3 measurable targets, community language |
| 2 | The Proof | Three-layer tamper-resistant evidence: digital, human, physical |
| 3 | The Benchmark | Four pass/fail gates: economic viability, climate resilience, gender inclusion, non-revenue control |
| 4 | The Ledger | Immutable timestamped public record at $0.001 per transaction |
| 5 | The Score | 0–100 counting-based score, zero analyst discretion |
Score formula: (Gates passed + Evidence layers active + Months clean ledger) ÷ 19 × 100
Financing signals:
- 90–100: Preferential financing eligible
- 80–89: Standard financing, enhanced monitoring
- 70–79: Restructuring required
- Below 70: Financing suspended
Try the VIS calculator at: vis-standard.org
Score your project across all five pillars and download a formatted report.
VIS can be applied across international development contexts where community-level accountability has consistently lagged behind investment commitments, including:
- Congo Basin critical minerals — cobalt, copper, lithium governance
- Clean cooking energy access — sub-Saharan Africa
- Circular economy supply chains — cocoa, coffee, cotton traceability
- Community development projects — any context requiring verifiable impact claims
- Download the VIS Spreadsheet v1.1 (locked formulas, open inputs)
- Complete the Promise document for your project
- Establish all three evidence layers before scoring
- Score quarterly using the spreadsheet or the online calculator
- Submit your use case to our Use Case Registry
Kamoga, J.C. (2026). The Verifiable Impact Standard (VIS):
A Minimum Viable Standard for Community-Level Impact Verification.
Working Paper. Open-source, CC BY 4.0.
Available at: https://vis-standard.org
VIS is an open framework. Contributions are welcomed in three forms:
Use cases — document how you applied VIS in your project. Open a Discussion in the Use Cases category.
Methodological critique — flag concerns about specific gates, evidence layers, or scoring logic. Open an Issue.
Sector adaptations — propose how VIS should be adapted for a new sector or context. Open a Discussion in the Sector Adaptations category.
| Version | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| v1.0 | May 2026 | Initial draft |
| v1.1 | June 2026 | Current release. Tested in water access contexts. |
| v2.0 | Q1 2027 (planned) | Post-RCT evidence, longitudinal sector data |
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
You are free to share, adapt, and build upon this work for any purpose, provided appropriate credit is given to the author.
Author: John Chrysostom Kamoga Contact: johnckamoga@gmail.com Website: vis-standard.org