Testing Tools for Assessing Systemic Change: Outcome Harvesting – The ALCP Project in the Georgian Dairy Industry

Outcome harvesting (OH) is a qualitative evaluation technique that gathers (aka “harvests”) narratives from an array of key stakeholders about intended and unintended changes related to an intervention, then verifies and analyzes those changes through a highly consultative and iterative six-step process. This paper summarizes MSA’s test of the OH approach as a tool to measure systemic change. In May and June 2016, MSA applied OH to the Alliances Lesser Caucasus Programme (ALCP)’s work in the dairy industry in Georgia. In so doing, MSA adapted the tool to be sensitive to identifying systemic change outcomes. Instead of focusing on systemic changes within the market system, this application innovatively looked at systemic changes in the geographic areas where ALCP operated and hence identified a much broader set of systemic changes.

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