For Immediate Release:

Sunday, May 19, 2019

Hi, I am Awuor Ponge, an Independent M&E Consultant; Associate Research Fellow in a Think Tank and Adjunct Faculty in a Public University in Kenya. I have a passion for Participatory Approaches and Tools in Gender and Development and this prompts my interest in Outcome Harvesting (OH) as a Participatory Evaluation approach, and the desire to make the process gender-responsive and equity-focused. In today’s post, I share some methodological considerations, and will share additional considerations tomorrow, in Part II.
I asked Ricardo Wilson-Grau, just before his passing on, about the ways in which OH as an emerging participatory approach to evaluation could be made gender-responsive and equity-focused. This generated some debate in the Outcome Harvesting Forum.
For a start, it is important to ask these important questions in designing the Outcome Harvest:

• What is the Outcome? What was done? How did each category of actors contribute to this?
• Who did what? How did each category of actors contribute to this?
• Where was it done? How was the choice of location and actors?
• How it was done? What was the role of each of the actors?

To address issues of gender-responsiveness and equity-focus, the Harvester as well as the Harvest users need to identify the contribution of the outcome to the needs of men and women, as well as the marginalised categories. The harvest process should be able to isolate the specific vulnerabilities and inequalities and how these play out during the outcome harvesting. For example, how do we engage single-female headed households, rural women, women with disabilities among others, in the process?
Lesson Learned: Ricardo Wilson-Grau’s Methodological Considerations
During the debate, Ricardo Wilson-Grau did give some methodological guidelines, which are worth mentioning:

• Reference for Principal Uses and Users: Make sure that the terms of reference explicitly or at least implicitly require that one or more of the principal uses of the primary intended users is that the OH process and product be gender-responsive or equity-focused or both.
• Negotiating the Terms of Reference: If the harvesting or evaluation questions that will guide the application of OH are not gender-responsive or equity-focused or both, in negotiating the terms of reference, make them explicitly so.
• Identifying the useful Harvest Questions: In the design of the harvest, ensure that the information that will be required to answer the harvesting questions, and how it is collected, are gender-responsive or equity-focused or both.
• Context specification for intended users: Gender-responsiveness or equity-focus have to not only be methodologically sound but also adapted to what the primary users understand those terms to be and contextualised for their specific uses of the Outcome Harvest application.
• Utilisation-focus of the Harvest Findings: Throughout the outcome harvest, primary users, co-evaluators will check on the gender-responsiveness or equity-focus and adapt as necessary, to make sure that the harvesting process and findings are proving useful in the light of the other principal uses.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.