Outcome
Harvesting
What is it?
Outcome Harvesting is a monitoring, evaluation and learning approach that serves the needs of managers, donors and evaluators attempting to solve intractable problems, unexpected challenges in development and social change.
Inspired by Outcome Mapping and informed by Utilization-Focused Evaluation, Outcome Harvesting enables monitoring and evaluation professionals, grant makers, managers and implementers to identify, formulate, verify, and make sense of outcomes.
Outcome Harvesting has proven especially useful in hundreds of civil society and governmental projects, programmes and organizations in over 140 countries on all seven continents.
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Outcome Harvesting is implemented in six key steps and can be customized to the specific needs of your organization.
When should I use it?
When the main focus is on outcomes
Outcome Harvesting emphasis is in effectiveness instead of efficiency or performance, allowing to learn what was achieved and how.
If the programming context is complex
Outcome Harvesting is suitable for unpredictable and complex environments where relations of cause and effect are not fully understood.
When the purpose is monitoring and evaluation
Outcome Harvesting is designed not only to track changes in behaviour of social actors influenced by an intervention but also to support learning about achievements.
Who developed Outcome Harvesting?
Ricardo Wilson-Grau
Ricardo Wilson-Grau started working in the early 2000’s as an independent evaluator and organisational development consultant supporting social change organisations, in particular networks, and private donor programmes. From 2002 until his passing in 2018, Ricardo developed Outcome Harvesting working closely with co-evaluators and commissioners of evaluation.
Want to learn more about Ricardo Wilson-Grau?
After his passing, a group of facilitators that worked together with Ricardo Wilson-Grau keep facilitating and continuing the practice and further development of Outcome Harvesting.
Carmen Wilson-Grau
My cross-cultural life experience, born in Guatemala and raised in The Netherlands, is at the root of my commitment to help people, so they too can realize their potential, by supporting social change organizations.
Conny Hoitink
As outcome harvesting consultant, I advise on and implement the introduction of Outcome Harvesting for monitoring, evaluation and learning.
Goele Scheers
Driven by my interest in understanding complex social change processes, I started to work with Outcome Mapping in 2005 in my position as PME Coordinator at the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC).
Want to know more about us? Check our full profiles!
Don't Miss our next event!
Outcome Harvesting Community Webinar
Participatory session on the Outcome Harvesting Substantiation Tool After presenting the panel titled “To Adapt or Not To Adapt? Retaining Quality when Tailoring Outcome Harvesting” at AEA 2023, the presenters and moderator came up with the idea to develop a substantiation tool for OH practitioners to serve as a simple guide on deciding if and how to carry out substantiation. The prototype of this tool was presented last year during an OH Community Webinar on the same topic as the panel, followed by a session at EES 2024. Based on the feedback and input received, we will share the latest version of the tool during this participatory webinar, along with instructions on how to use it, and gather your input for the final version.
We look forward to your participation!
24 July 2025, 15.00 hrs CEST / 13.00 hrs UTC / 9.00 hrs EST
You can join using this Zoom Link
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Looking for more Resources?
Outcome Harvesting
By: Ricardo Wilson-Grau
Published in 2018, Ricardo Wilson-Grau explains in his book the steps of Outcome Harvesting and how to customize them according to the nine underlying principles. He shares his experience and gives practical advice on how to work with Outcome Harvesting and remain true to its essential features.
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Access our documents
Access our repository of documents, check and download them to get more information.