Outcome Harvesting: Good Practices to Assure the Quality

GPPAC, together with Partos and independent consultant and evaluator, Wolfgang Richert, organised a workshop on Outcome Harvesting (OH) on 24 April 2018 at Bleyenberg in the Hague.

Outcome Harvesting is a process for monitoring or evaluating projects, programmes or organisations. It is composed of six steps, namely: (1) designing the harvest, (2) reviewing the documentation, (3) engaging informants, (4) substantiating, (5) analysing, and (6) supporting the use of the findings.

The event commenced with four presentations of cases of OH practices:

1. Karen Biesbrouck from Oxfam Novib;

2. Conny Hoitink from Wetlands International;

3. Gunilla Kuperus from WWF Netherlands;

4. Maya Verlinden from the Milieudefensie with Charlotte Floors, IUCN Netherlands, and Trudi van Ingen, Tropenbos International.  

The presentations were preceded by four working groups, each of which focused on one of the following topics: identifying and drafting outcomes, reviewing draft outcomes, substantiating and ex-post analysis. At the closing of the event, recommendations were presented, such as that not only individual outcomes, but also ‘threads' or ‘clusters' of outcomes, analyses, and narratives should be substantiated; and open questions were discussed, such as how to make OH more bottom-up.

The event as a whole was beneficial to the participant organisation working in OH, and they will will engage in future learning exchanges on how to assure the quality of OH.