Exploring Outcome Harvesting at our Scripture Engagement Forum

At the beginning of February, SIL Tanzania held a week-long forum for SE, arts and literacy staff, to share ideas, spend time in God’s Word, learn and plan together. Fifteen people gathered together from four different Bible translation cluster projects, and we were also joined by two Language Programs Interns. One day was spent exploring Outcome Harvesting. What we looked at:

• What is Outcome Harvesting? (Discussed the importance of goals and measuring progress and talked about Outcome Statements and how to write them.)
• What have we done so far in Mbeya? (Discussed the process we have been through.)
• What have we learnt? (Looked at some of the data.)
• What implications do these findings have for our work? (General discussion.)
• How can we continue to use Outcome Harvesting in ongoing monitoring and evaluation? (General discussion.)

To help the participants understand how the sense-making process works, I got us all doing some sense-making together, using Outcome Statements from the Malila language area (the same set of statements we used when we met with the CBO). We looked at the SE Impact Chain together and then grouped the statements accordingly, which was a fun activity and stimulated some initial observations that we then added to as I continued to share some highlights of our analysis and findings.

Sense-making observations

• Many people have read and heard the Malila Scriptures, so it seems we have succeeded at the ‘hear/read’ level of the SE Impact Chain
• But, has the focus been more on helping people read/hear without thinking about how they will ‘use’ the Scriptures and be changed by them?
• What role does the Holy Spirit play in the process of changing lives? (How much influence do we have over this aspect of the SE Impact Chain?)
• Distribution has been successful, at least amongst those researched (but if you look at the data more closely there are question marks over whether distribution is ongoing)
• There is little evidence of creation of new Malila resources (there’s just a few songs)
• What strategy is there for reaching the whole community? (Remember the apostle Paul’s strategy of visiting key towns)
• How do we hear from and reach people who haven’t attended workshops and meetings? (i.e. the broader community)
• Where there is strong input, we see strong outputs (i.e. where there has been a big investment in teaching, training people, having staff working full-time etc., we can see a lot of fruit)
• What about children? (Not much evidence of them being reached)
• It’s important to follow up training and to invest in people that we have taught
• Look for people with a heart for the work, who have caught the vision – they can do a lot!

A couple of implications for our work

Out of the sense-making conversations and through other conversations during the forum, one area that stood out for everyone was children. How can we invest more in them? If they aren’t excited about using the local language then the translated Scriptures will cease being used after the current adult generation passes away. Also children are often much quicker to pick up how to read the language, but they need attractive resources and direct input (i.e. don’t rely on adults we have trained to pass on their knowledge to children.)

Another important point that came up here, and again throughout the week, was recognising that our goal is engagement with the Scriptures and transformation, not just distribution. This should drive all our planning.

Ongoing monitoring and evaluation

We agreed that all our teams should learn how to write Outcome Statements and be involved in harvesting these as we go about our work. The importance of follow-up and listening for stories needs to be emphasised. These statements should be written into central databases (spreadsheets for each cluster project), so that they can be used in report writing and also analysed. One suggestion was that at the end of every year, each team should do some sense-making with the statements gathered over that year. To this end, I have created a template spreadsheet for each team to use, and a PowerPoint that they can use to explain about Outcome Harvesting to the rest of the project staff.

Coming up

This week I am heading to Nairobi to attend the Africa Scripture Engagement Conference. Once again I will have an opportunity to share about Outcome Harvesting, as part of a presentation on research (my co-presenter will be sharing about SE Research & Ministry in Cameroon).

By Katherine O'Donnell