Capturing What Matters: Using Outcome Harvesting to Evaluate Community-Led Humanitarian Innovation

The CLIP at a Glance

The Community-Led Innovation Partnership (CLIP) was a six-year global initiative funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and implemented across Guatemala, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Sudan. The program sought to address a persistent gap in the humanitarian sector by placing crisis-affected communities at the center of innovation processes. Rather than importing humanitarian solutions from outside, CLIP empowered local innovators to identify challenges, develop solutions, test ideas, and scale successful innovations within their own communities.

Implemented through a partnership of global and local organizations, CLIP supported 94 community-led innovations, engaged approximately 3,300 community innovators, and contributed to positive changes affecting more than 150,000 people. The program operated in highly diverse contexts, ranging from disaster-prone regions in Southeast Asia to fragile and conflict-affected settings in South Sudan and Guatemala.

Combining Theory of Change and Outcome Harvesting

Evaluating a program as complex and dynamic as CLIP required a methodology capable of capturing both planned and emergent results. To achieve this, the evaluation team combined a Theory of Change (ToC) approach with Outcome Harvesting (OH), supplemented by case studies.

The ToC provided the overarching analytical framework. During the inception phase, the evaluation team refined and clustered success indicators across different units of analysis, allowing for a systematic assessment of the program’s intended outcomes. Outcome Harvesting complemented this approach by focusing on actual changes in community-level behaviors, relationships, and practices, regardless of whether they had been anticipated in advance. This combination enabled the evaluation to assess both contribution to expected results and the emergence of unexpected outcomes.

A particularly innovative aspect of the methodology was the integration of a resilience framework into the Outcome Harvesting process. Each harvested outcome was categorized according to five community capital domains: human, social, environmental, financial/livelihood, and physical/material resources and basic services. This allowed the evaluation team not only to document individual outcomes but also to analyze how innovations contributed to broader community resilience. Rather than treating resilience as a single outcome, the evaluation examined how different types of change interacted to strengthen communities’ capacity to adapt, recover, and thrive.

From Verification to Learning: The Role of Substantiation Workshops

Through document review, interviews, and focus group discussions, the evaluation team harvested 126 Outcome Statements across the four implementation countries. Rather than treating verification as a purely technical exercise, the team organized substantiation workshops with national partners, transforming the verification process into an opportunity for collective reflection, sensemaking, and learning. During these workshops, participants reviewed Outcome Statements, assessed supporting evidence, discussed contribution pathways, and reflected on the scale and significance of the changes observed. This participatory process not only strengthened the credibility and rigor of the findings but also fostered greater local ownership of the evaluation. By actively engaging partners in the interpretation and validation of results, the workshops positioned them as co-creators of knowledge rather than merely sources of information.

The Added Value of Outcome Harvesting

Outcome Harvesting proved particularly well suited to evaluating community-led humanitarian innovation. It captured the complexity of change in diverse contexts, surfaced unexpected outcomes, and generated evidence on pathways of impact that conventional evaluation approaches might have missed. By combining OH with a Theory of Change framework and a resilience lens, the evaluation was able to balance accountability with learning, while producing a rich and participatory understanding of how community-led innovation contributes to resilience, agency, and locally driven humanitarian action.

Read the CLIP executive summary and evaluation report here.