Looking Backwards to Improve in the Future: The Benefits of Outcome Harvesting

Outcome harvesting is an evaluation technique in which change agents identify and evaluate outcomes and work backwards to determine what activities contributed to those outcomes.

Outcome harvesting is particularly effective at identifying unintended outcomes, as all outcomes are identified and assessed, not just those that were intended. In many M&E methods, the focus tends to be on measuring outcomes against intended change. Outcome harvesting requires investigators to consider all outcomes irrespective of the intentions or aims of the intervention.

According to Ricardo Wilson-Grau & Heather Witt, it is most useful when three conditions are present. One is when an intervention is complex, such as when there are many different factors that can contribute to change or when the nexus between inputs and outputs is not well understood. In highly complex situations, often only after a change occurs are change agents able to then attribute those changes to a cause. Where this is the case, outcome harvesting can allow development sector actors to modify their approaches over time.

It can also be useful where the complexity arises from the creation of multiple changes, all of which need to be related to one input or another.

Another condition where outcome harvesting is appropriate is when the focus of the evaluation is to identify what changes occurred and why they did. By observing the changes that occurred and analysing why they occurred, investigators look backwards to see which activities caused those changes. The focus is on looking backwards to learn what activities were most valuable and should be repeated or continued, rather than to examine inputs and consider their effectiveness.

The third reason to deploy outcome harvesting during an M&E activity is to improve in the future by learning from the past. If changes can be linked to specific inputs in ways that may not have been either intended or obvious when an intervention was carried out, future work can be enhanced by a fuller understanding of how change occurred.

Using outcome harvesting is a way of looking backwards to see what works so that those activities can be repeated in the future. It is a powerful way for development actors to learn how to maximise their impact.

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