Map making 4: Further consequences (or outcomes)
What are the consequences of the consequences?
Once you have worked through all of your outputs and mapped the observed or expected consequences of each, start to work through each of those consequences and ask yourself the same questions:
What then happens as a result of this consequence or outcome?
What are the further consequences of this?
What happens next? / What do we hope will happen next?
Then keep going, and keep going until you can go no further!
Some examples of further consequences/outcomes (and their consequences in brackets) are:
- Increased value of education for all.
- Less money spent on medical expenses.
- Club members use their compost on garden beds (-> Plants thrive. -> Increased yield, etc)
- Overall development of the village
- Women empowered (->women’s group established)
- Group (and their households) consume more fresh vegetables (-> improved diet and lower expenditure on food -> more money available for other things)
- Group sells surplus produce (-> increase to household incomes -> more money available for other things)
- Farmers grow a wider range of crops (-> more diverse source of income)
Activity: Add further consequences to your map by asking yourself the questions above and link them to their precedents. Add further consequences or outcomes to the right. Keep doing this until you can go no further! (this might be when you reach an impact)
Terminology Disclaimer
You may feel that some of these consequences are definitely outcomes, and others may feel like impacts, whereas some may still feel like intermediate outcomes or even a type of output! The outputs, outcomes and impacts will depend on the scope of the project.
For example, a project with the aim of writing a training course syllabus and materials course might have ‘training course syllabus and materials’ as an output or even an outcome, where another project (that plans to train farmers as a first step for example) may have ‘training syllabus and materials’ as an input. Do not worry about this or get stuck on it. We will see things called different things in different projects. For this mapping process, there is no need to distinguish between these at this stage. Just keep mapping!