Director, Learning, Evidence and Impact team Pact, United States
Over the past five years, Pact has promoted Outcome Harvesting as a complexity-aware method that enables us to capture unanticipated outcomes in complex projects, where indicators are often insufficient to tell our story of impact. To date, Pact has conducted eight Outcome Harvesting exercises in seven countries. In each use case, evaluators carried out the methodology in different ways, due to varying constraints such as: inability to or challenges in identifying third party substantiators, insufficient staffing or staff availability to fully engage in data collection and analysis, using program staff as outcome statement sources rather than sourcing directly from project stakeholders, competing priorities for using the method, and evaluative comprehension of partner staff). To reflect on the varying Outcome Harvesting practices across Pact and summarize best practices and areas for improvement, we undertook a case study review to asses: 1) how the OH steps were actually implemented in each exercise compared to the official OH guidance, what worked well and did not work well and why; 2) how participatory or empowerment-focused the OH process really was; and 3) how the OH analyses was received by donors, project participants and other stakeholders. This will present the summary findings from this study of ten OH exercises, and conclude with an assessment of which adaptations to the Outcome Harvesting methodology may be considered acceptable and which adaptations may have strayed too far from the original methodology.
