Outcome Harvesting | Helvetas Western Balkan

HELVETAS, together with its national partners, has implemented projects of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) in the Western Balkan region for over a decade. This Outcome Harvesting process responded to the objective of Helvetas to better understand the effects and effectiveness of three of its most mature Market Systems Development (MSD) projects while at the same time explored a better way to capture rich but hard-to-measure and unanticipated changes in the complex and dynamic contexts of the Western Balkans. The three projects selected in this Outcome Harvesting process are Enhancing Youth Employment (EYE) in Kosovo, MarketMakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and RisiAlbania in Albania.

The objectives of the process were to help the project teams learn and improve on what they were doing; document evidence that showed that the projects’ interventions had achieved observable results; and contribute to learning in the practice of market systems development by disseminating the results and experiences of the study. An additional objective was to test the efficacy of outcome harvesting in complementing the projects’ internal monitoring and results measurement (MRM) system to capture rich but hard-to- measure and unanticipated changes in complex and dynamic contexts.