Outcome Harvesting

Outcome Harvesting is a methodology for identifying, describing, and analyzing changes resulting from advocacy interventions to improve effectiveness and accountability.

Advocacy interventions seek to change policies and practices, reform institutions, alter power relations, and change attitudes for the greater good of society. These interventions involve coalition building, rallying communities to stand for a cause, evidence generation and dialogue with decision makers, and litigation to protect public interests among others.

Over the years Civil society organizations have learnt that the problems they seek to solve are complex and require engagement of multiple stakeholders to align to common goals and collective actions to drive change. This has increased the practice of working in coalitions and networks among CSOs. Despite the power and platform that coalitions provide, CSOs continue to struggle to articulate outcomes of advocacy interventions implemented in coalitions.

The Challenge

The change process is normally slow and requires several actors to change their perceptions and actions to enable policy change. In addition, the ultimate focus on policy change (end goal) shadows the intermediate ‘process changes’ from getting noticed.

Tendency to focus reporting and accountability of advocacy interventions on activities implemented rather than how they influence change among social actors.

Coalitions bring together multiple actors with diverse resources who influence unintended outcomes among social actors. These are often not accounted for since they were not planned.

What is Outcome Harvesting

Outcome harvesting is a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) methodology used to identify, describe, verify and analyse outcomes. In the context of outcome harvesting, an outcome is defined as “a change in the behaviour, relationships, actions, activities, policies, or practices of an individual, group,community, organisation, or institution” (Wilson-Grau and Britt 2013).

The change process is normally slow. OH tracks the ‘process changes’ right from change in perceptions of social actors, their actions, power relations, and policy changes.

The retrospective approach of focusing on change and working backwards to establish what contributed to change enables actors to track unintended outcomes.

The focus on understanding how change happens and the significance of change enables actors in complex multi stakeholder engagements to learn about the change process to improve performance.

Outcome Harvesting provides a systematic and objective process of capturing and verifying qualitative changes that enriches reporting and accountability.

Outcomes in OH

Outcomes are changes in behaviour Actions, relationships, policies, practices
The change takes place in a social actor
The change has to be observable change in behavior.
The change has to be significant/important.

Outcome harvesting is designed to collect evidence of change and then work backwards to assess whether or how an organisation, programme or project contributed to that change.

Why OH is suitable for tracking change in Advocacy programs

The change process is normally slow. OH tracks the ‘process changes’ right from change in perceptions of social actors, their actions, power relations, and policy changes.

The retrospective approach of focusing on change and working backwards to establish what contributed to change enables actors to track unintended outcomes.

The focus on understanding how change happens and the significance of change enables actors in complex multi stakeholder engagements to learn about the change process to improve performance.

Outcome Harvesting provides a systematic and objective process of capturing and verifying qualitative changes that enriches reporting and accountability.

The Six Steps of the OH Process

Describing Outcomes in OH

Outcome Description: Example

Outcome Description: Between February and May 2018, the Sub county local governments in Hoima district increased budget allocations for the financial year 2018/2019 to cater for community priorities such as environmental conservation identified during community visioning exercise. Kabwoya s/c increased the environment budget from Ugx 4,000,000 to Ugx 5.500.000 towards purchase of irrigation equipment, wetland restoration and demarcation.

Significance: The integration of community priorities in the sub county plans and budget directly relates to the programme’s objective of advocating for Districts to develop and enforce green and inclusive district plans, by-laws and ordinances. Secondly, the recognition and integration of the community priorities in the sub county plans and budgets also contributes to achieving the objective of having Communities empowered to participate in resource use planning, and in EIA implementation.

Contribution: ECOTRUST conducted local community consultation meetings during which community visions were developed. Dialogue meetings between ECOTRUST and sub-county CDOs were organized where the community visions were discussed and CDOs adopted them for integration in the district workplans and budgets. It took a lot of lobby and sensitization efforts by the sub county CDOs to have the budget allocations increased because most leaders on the district executive did not attach much value to environmental issues. Periodic monitoring and reporting on the district work plans and budgets by ECOTRUST was done to ascertain this.

How we can Help: Refuse To Fail Mentoring Program

Refuse To Fail provides a customized package for supporting implementing agencies adopt the OH methodology with mentoring support over a period of 6 months to 1 year.

Three-day training on introduction to Outcome Harvesting
Design of customized tool for tracking outcomes
Two biannual mentoring sessions with staff to review and verify Outcomes
One reflection session with staff to analyze outcomes and draw lessons for improvement

COST: 14 Million UGX

US$ 3,900

We believe in the power of learning and rapid adaptation to build a world that democratizes prosperity and wellbeing.

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