So what is a result?

We're talking about Results-Based Management so let's be clear what results are. For some people, their football team scoring a goal or winning a match, that's a result. In a sense, it's true.

However, we can define a results as as any change in a state or condition that comes as a consequence of a cause-and-effect relationship. Something is done and the result is what has changed. Now, these changes can be intended changes, things that we planned, part of our strategy, but they can also be unintended changes, surprises, things we did not expect. These changes can be positive, beneficial for end users, target communities, and they can also have a negative impact. Let's look at those more closely.

So we have unintended, intended, positive, and negative. Let's start with the intended positive change. That usually corresponds very closely to the project's intent, that is to say, the project's outcome, what it promises to deliver, and the project's impacts on the wider society. This is what we mean by an intended positive change. We planned for it, it was achieved, and it was beneficial.

What about the others? So let's look at these unintended positive changes. They often represent surprises or initiatives where things came out great, but they were not actually what we planned.

One example is the NGO that provided outdoor latrines to a community. And when they went back to check the toilets were all in great condition. But the villagers had chosen to use them to keep their goats safe.

Unintended positive outcomes often represent a great learning for us, learning that we don't always know best, learning that we need to listen better to our stakeholders, and also learning to recognize that our target communities have the wisdom to do as they wish with the resources we provide.

Unintended results can also be negative - these unexpected impacts, things that we didn't plan for, again, surprises - but nasty surprises. One NGO, for example, in order to free up the time of women and girls who had to spend hours each day collecting water, decided to provide water pumps throughout the community. Now this is great - they succeeded in their intended positive outcome. There was certainly less labor. There was less time spent fetching water. And as an impact, the women were free to do other things, to be economically active and participate more in village life.

However, there was an unexpected impact. Each day, when the women and girls went down to the river to collect water, they'd stop and they would chat and they would support each other. They would talk about the situation at home. It would become a kind of forum for talking about domestic issues and also how to deal with difficult husbands and domestic abuse, sexual and reproductive health, raising their children. And one unexpected impact was this forum was suddenly no longer there.

And there are three levels of result. There are the outputs, the outcome, and the impact.

The outputs are the short-term or the medium-term intermediate end results of our activities. And together they bring about the project outcome, which is what the project promises to deliver publicly as its stated aim. Whereas the impact is beyond the life-cycle of the project, is not the sole responsibility of the project, and affects the target community in the longer term or affects the wider community as a whole.