Lessons and challenges in integrating Outcome Harvesting in the organisational MEAL set-up

I am Karen Ansbæk, senior MEAL advisor with the Danish Institute for Human Rights which has been using Outcome Harvesting across all its international, donor funded work since 2018. The first few years, a lot of effort was put into setting up a system and popularising the methodology among colleagues and by now it is running fairly smoothly, but not without challenges. Below I will outline some of the learning and solutions we have come up with over the years, but also a few challenges that are still unsolved.

The commonOHdatabase allows all relevant staff to enter outcomes for their projects, which is a crucial aspect for the integration of the methodology across all departments and projects. Thus, we have built an app in the Podio software that enables each harvester to enter the Outcome Description, Significance Description and Contribution Description as well as various tagging used to analyse the data e.g. when exported to Power BI. The app also has a ‘comments’ function which makes the ping-pong [Step 3 of OH: Engaging Sources] easy.

Regular OH training and refreshers for colleagues every six months just before the semi-annual harvesting deadline. A common challenge is to distinguish between outputs and outcomes, which is therefore a main element in all refresher training. We have learned that it is important to make the definitions crystal clear, but at the same time it needs to be acknowledged that there is a grey area, requiring a thorough discussion between the harvester and the MEAL staff to place the result in the right category.

In total we harvest around 200-300 outcomes per year. We use this wealth of data when doing donor reporting and internal reporting and make it available to external consultants when we commission end-evaluations. The data is also used for adaptive project management through sensemaking processes at the project level where the harvested outcomes are mapped against objectives / Theories of Change. The ensuing discussions give a lot of insight into how change is achieved and how we can adjust implementation plans and / or project design to achieve as much change as possible towards the promotion and protection of human rights. While the people involved very much appreciate these sensemaking sessions, they are not always prioritised by project teams and managers in their busy schedules.

The MEAL team recently did an internal assessment of how the integrated MEAL system is working and a few OH related challenges came up.

One challenge was that many colleagues felt that they also wanted to document their outputs. One easy way of doing so is to use the Contribution Description when harvesting outcomes. However, this does not make room for outputs which have not produced any outcomes (yet). The general sentiment among colleagues is that they lack a place to document ‘what they have done’ e.g. over the last 6 months - for themselves and their immediate manager. Also, we might lose track of some outcomes if we don’t follow up on non-reported outputs or we may miss the learning associated with outputs leading to nothing.

The other common challenge is that many colleagues feel that outcome harvesting is extractive in the sense that they feed their outcomes into the database, but do not use them in their own reporting. Yet, there are no technical restrictions for colleagues to extract and use the outcomes from the OH database, so we will need to look into what barriers they experience.

I hope to hear your reflections and possible solutions to these challenges in your response to my blog and in conversation at the Outcome Harvesting Community Exchange Meeting, taking place 7–9 July 2026 in Arusha. See you there :)