http://results-based-management.blogspot.com/2010/08/bilateral-results-frameworks-usaid-difd.html

Activity -the process of reaching the aimed objective ,

Out put -the effort of the activity

Outcome – the quality received and service increased

impact- long intended objective to change real problem.

But for people in the field, in local governments, or NGOs, all of this is fairly arcane. Explaining the RBM terminology in another language – Thai, Khmer,
Vietnamese or Bahasa Indonesia, for example – brings home how artificial and unnecessary these terms, and the distinctions different agencies make between them, are. My conclusions, both from trying to explain this myself,
directly in other languages, and in other cases through interpreters, is that in some cases people working in these languages have to create new terms to explain all of this. And as in English – who can remember what these terms
mean the week after a workshop? The jargon essentially makes communication more difficult, and who needs that?

Over the past few years, in the context of monitoring several dozen development projects, on a variety of topics in Southeast Asia, I asked Southeast Asian development professionals, how they would describe their own results. The unsurprising conclusion is that the simplest word to explain results in most of these languages – and a word people can share among languages and occupations – is “change” – short term, mid-term and long term.

Taken in this context, it is somewhat easier to help people distinguish between “changes”, and the activities that may contribute to the changes. This is already the underlying premise for most results-based management frameworks in any
case, and adding another layer of terminology to it, does not seem to clarify people’s thinking, or increase their enthusiasm for using the process.

Talking about results in terms of change, on the other hand, makes it relatively easy to facilitate the discussion of results among people using different languages – and among the different occupational cultures – engineering, education, economics, governance, environment, for example, who often find that their specific occupational jargon obscures communication with other groups, with political leaders, and with the people they are supposed to be trying to assist.

Once people clarify what has changed or what they hope will change, it is a relatively simple matter to translate this into the jargon of whatever donor agency they are working with.

The jargon gets in the way of explaining the results, but focusing on “change”, seems to make the process a bit simpler.

I think Hariadi Wibisono from New Delhi has explained it nicely.

Hariadi Wibisono
New Delhi

Peter Buyondo
Kampala

I work in Africa for similar donors and networks like you do. I face similar challenges in making these definitions. My definitions are pretty close to those of Rick Davies…and use the reverse engineering approach

Outputs: What we did

Outcomes: What happened – ie: response of the intervention site to our actions.

Impact: what Changed.

Mutahi Ngunyi
The Consulting House
Nairobi Kenya

FYI, my own actor oriented definitions go along these lines:

Activity: processes within the organisation concerned

Outputs: goods or services produced by the organisation and used by others

Outcomes: immediate to short term changes in the user of those outputs

Impact: longer term changes in that user, or more distant changes – in others who have a relationship with the user.