On Wednesday, November 15, 2023, ActionAid International Uganda trained 31 stakeholders, programme implementers and staff on outcome harvesting for evidence-based documentation and success storytelling.
Following a UNFPA-UNICEF Joint Programme on the Elimination of Female Genital Mutilation in the Sebei sub-region, ActionAid International Uganda which has been implementing the project, organised a training for stakeholders, programme implementers and staff on outcome harvesting at Noah’s Ark Hotel in Kapchorwa town from November 15-17, 2023.
According to Ononge Samuel, the Project Officer, the project aims at social norm transformation and changing mindsets on practices that violate the rights of women and girls.
He said ActionAid has been implementing the project on child marriages, female genital mutilation and gender-based violence and has equipped the community with information on how to end these practices by creating an environment that is gender sensitive.
“We have been having interventions in communities, we found it better to have a track and monitoring of the changes caused by the intervention and the programme at large,” he said.
He added: “We expect that the stakeholders will provide us with reports on the impact of the project and monitor it to ensure that there is sustainability. This will enable us to have information that confirms whether what we are doing is changing the lives of the community members.”
Outcome harvesting
Outcome Harvesting collects (“harvests”) evidence of what has changed (“outcomes”) and, then, working backwards, determines whether and how an intervention has contributed to these changes.
Patrick Sando, a Consultant in Monitoring and Evaluation who trained the participants, said organisations have been falling short of communicating the changes that are created by the different project activities.
“The norm traditionally has been…people write different reports to their funders…they are accustomed to telling what they have implemented but the big question is so what? Is there some sort of practice that has changed with the people you want to influence?” he said.
“So, this approach called outcome harvesting is really anchored on telling the change.”
According to Sando, instead of focusing on communicating change, organisations have been focusing on communicating the activities that they have done.
“There are different levels of change. There is a long-term change. Then there are the low-hanging fruits of change that you need to recognise before you get to achieve the long-term change. Usually that (short-term change) is missed in documenting.”
During the training, participants came up with outcome statements, contributions and significance formulated from their imagined projects.
Based on the feedback received from the participants of the training, Sando believes there will be a change in the way people document their project outcomes and tell success stories.
“We hope that reporting will change and storytelling will change based on evidence and credible information.”
Some of the participants who talked to SoftPowerNews demonstrated a grasp of the concepts they learned in the course of the training.
Athiyo Emmy, Nakapiripirit Youth Secretary, said he learnt how to use inputs to produce outputs and then celebrate the short-term outcomes.
Cherotic Febia, a Senior Community Development Officer in Kapchorwa Local Government, said the training changed her way of understanding outcomes.
“I’m going to build the capacity of my fellow colleagues to ensure that we are able to change the way we have been doing things and one core area is on documentation of evidence,” she said.
