Taking stock of three years of joining forces in a south-south partnership

Four years since its inception, PAL Network is entering a new phase and is collectively designing a new strategy that will be implemented from January 2020. In the coming years, the Network will focus on strengthening its four main base pillars, Assessments, Action, Advocacy and Research.  But before moving forward, it is time to look back and take stock of what the past three years of PAL Network has brought to the table.

This stocktaking is being carried through an Outcome Harvesting review that started in December 2018 and will last until May 2019. In December 2018, PAL Network staff gathered for two days in Nairobi to describe outcomes that they had influenced. Subsequently, in February 2019, PAL network member organisations gathered for an interactive write shop in Nairobi to describe outcomes achieved collectively.

The workshop participants were eager to learn about Outcome Harvesting and found it an innovative approach to Monitoring and Evaluation. An outcome is ‘a change in behavior, policies, practices or actions in a social actor, which can be an individual, group/community, institution or organization to which the PAL network has contributed.’ Instead of systematically reviewing past activities, Outcome Harvesting takes stock of outcomes and then reviews PAL Network’s contribution.

During these workshops, around 20 participants yielded outcomes relevant to bringing learning to the centre of educational policy and practice, both at international and national levels that covered three years, 2016-2018. At the end of the second workshop, participants made sense of the outcomes they’d collected by reviewing the online interactive report published through Sprockler – a research tool that enables the collection and visualization of quantitative and qualitative data. Participants concluded that the most relevant outcomes were achieved through advocacy combined with assessment data at the global level. Strikingly, at this global level, a considerable number of successful outcomes were unintended, which could mean that the influence of the PAL Network in the international arena is bigger than expected.

“The outcome harvesting review gave a breath of view to identify who PAL Network has influenced through its main pillars of assessment and action. It provided a clear line of sight of what the network needs to do to achieve its vision where we have a world where all children acquire the foundational skills that allow them to thrive.” Maryanne Kimani, PAL Network.

The next step is to verify the outcomes and to gain a better understanding in the achieved change processes. This is referred to as ‘substantiation’ and happens through engagement with external informants who must be knowledgeable of the outcomes but independent of PAL network. The final Outcome Harvesting review report is expected in May 2019.