Outcome Harvesting: An Innovative Approach to Capturing Change in Youth Civic Engagement

Levante has in the recent past conducted a monitoring, evaluation, and learning assignment for two interlinked youth advocacy projects which sought to strengthen youth civic engagement and political participation in Jordan. The projects’ objective was to strengthen engagement by exploring innovative and experimental approaches including establishing safe convening spaces for young people and facilitating learning, networking, and organizing.

One of the highlights of this assignment for Levante was the opportunity to apply our Outcome Harvesting methodologies. Outcome Harvesting is fast becoming a preferred approach in the development sector when conducting evaluations of projects which are seeking to contribute to large-scale, long-term goals and societal change. This approach enables researchers to identify evidence of change before exploring the extent to which those changes can be attributed to the project’s interventions.

For this assignment, the team used the six stages of outcome harvesting which began with the harvest design. During this stage, the team conducted a thorough desk review of all the relevant documents to inform the second stage of the harvesting which is where the team gathered and described some outcomes of the project based on the available evidence and their significance to the overall project objectives. The team then went on to engage with the agents of change, in this case, the client organization and their local partners, to refine the identified outcomes and add any outcomes that may not have been included in the outcome harvesting workshop. This workshop also allowed the team to explore any implementation challenges, lessons learned, good practices, and the successes of the project.

In the second phase of the assignment, the team conducted an outcome validation exercise using key informant interviews and focus group discussions with youth participants of the project. These discussions also enabled us to obtain information on the effectiveness of the project in enabling the youth to create safe spaces for civic engagement as well as identify case studies of success stories. The team went on to analyze the data collected and categorize the validated outcomes before providing recommendations for future programming.

Among the challenges that the team experienced during this assignment was that the project was implemented by many different local partners and as such the implementation process differed from one location to another, resulting in different outcomes. Through an in-depth analysis of the available information and conversations with the implementation partners, the team was able to clarify the different project activities and identify what had been achieved.

A key finding that stood out for Levante is that we got practical experience conducting an online outcome harvesting workshop which was necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The team emerged with some best practices for future outcome harvesting events including breaking down the workshop into smaller sections spread over a few days to allow for deeper exploration of outcomes and identify outcomes that were unintended or unforeseen.