Telling training's story: adapting outcome harvesting to evaluate a public health management and leadership training program in Kenya

To scale up public health workforce capacity building programs, it’s important but difficult to illustrate how the program contributes to national or international health goals and agendas. As a result, many training programs simply report the number of graduates and their level of satisfaction, leaving funders and governments wondering what the outcome and impact of the program was on the country’s health system, national or international health goals. To go beyond this and tell the story of the true impact of a public health management and leadership training program in Kenya, we utilized the outcome harvesting method to illustrate if and how graduates were contributing to health system-level changes. While outcome harvesting is not intended to evaluate direct-service interventions, it was an ideal method to evaluate potential impact in an ever-changing environment, like a health system, where direct attribution is difficult to assess.