As we gather together in this venue in the executive capital of the Republic of South Africa, allow me to express my immense delight at the presence of delegations from the Republics of Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Benin, Ghana, and Senegal and our development partners from the European Union (EU), GIZ, World Bank and the CLEAR Initiative; our peers from Malaysia, Colombia and the United States.
I would like to welcome you to this, the first international workshop on Performance Monitoring and Evaluation that we have organised. I am very pleased that this first workshop is focusing on experiences from within the African continent. The idea for this initiative first arose in 2009 and follows on from discussions I had with my Burundian colleague on the sharing of experiences.
I am and certain that he would also be most pleased to see that our commitment to building our M&E systems through active cross country sharing has come to be realised through this event. It is hence my sincere hope that this is the start of an on-going conversation between our countries about how we make performance monitoring and evaluation not an administrative burden, but a way to ensure continuous improvement in our public services, greater impacts on our citizens, and better value for money from government expenditure.
Our work on performance monitoring and evaluation systems is about change. South Africa is changing, Africa is changing, the world is changing. By 2020 Africa’s position in the world will look very different as the continent continues to undergo quiet economic, social and technological revolutions. Global competition for Africa’s resources carries equally promise and peril, and has implications for how both government and corporates see and fulfil their responsibilities to society and environment.
Economically, Africa’s collective gross domestic product (GDP) already surpasses that of India, and by 2020 there will be 128 million households with discretionary income. With economic power comes political power. Socially, an emerging middle class that is taxed will place different demands upon government. In parallel, new forms of marginalisation in an increasingly urbanised continent will become visible.
Funding for development is finding new channels, and the challenges confronting African societies (as elsewhere) are broad in both complexity and scope. Solutions may need to be understood regionally, rather than just nationally or locally. Finally, Africa has taken to the digital revolution (as demonstrated for example by the world-leading M-Pesa cell phone banking in Kenya), with consequences for improved citizen access to different forms of information and social participation. As the demands for development are changing, performance monitoring and evaluation too must change.
The history of evaluation practice in Africa has often been driven by the accountability requirements of donors, but in the process the development of a solid foundation of capacity and professional practice has emerged. Yet it has not always addressed African development questions or invoked indigenous ways of seeing. There is a need for the emergence of an African monitoring and evaluation tradition which is both sensitive to African development imperatives and which can also work with African traditions so that advances can be achieved by working with local realities and frames of reference.
We in South Africa only started this journey much more recently than many of you, as we only made the transition to a new democratic system in 1994, more than 30 years after the independence of many African countries. Our decisive focus on Monitoring and Evaluation is even more recent, as although the concepts have been part of the work of government for a long time, the specific focus on performance M&E as a key tool to improve the performance and impact of government was reinforced with the coming of President Zuma in 2009.
At a policy level, in early 2009 we issued a Green Paper, entitled ‘Improving Government Performance: Our Approach’. To improve our performance we said we will need to be guided by a few non-negotiable principles:
- Provide leadership and making the tough decisions that may be required to deliver on our mandate.
- Strengthen our ability to co-operate across the three spheres of government and work as a single delivery machine.
- Build a partnership between government and civil society so that we work together to achieve our goal of a better life.
- Be completely transparent with each other. We must claim no easy victories, just tell the truth and build on what we have achieved.
- Recognise that there will always be limited funding and resources and yet be willing to commit to doing more with less and doing it on time.
- Develop a skilled and well-motivated public service that is proud of what it does and receives full recognition for delivering better quality services.
We said, “Government must be more effective in its actions. It must improve the quality of its services. Since 1994 we have successfully expanded access to services. The quality of services has however often been below standard. Massive increases in expenditure on services have not always brought the results we wanted or our people expected.
While building on work already done, we need to focus more on outcomes as we use our time, money and management. In education the measure is, can our grade 3 children read and write. In health, we must measure whether people are living longer, healthier lives. This requires a shift of focus from inputs – budgets, personnel and equipment - to managing for outcomes”.
This policy paper further set out a vision of government focusing on outcomes, that is, on the impacts government aims to have, and not just the activities that public servants do, which has been the dominant focus in the past. The challenge of focusing on outcomes is that they involve a range of departments and other stakeholders if they are to be achieved. Government is not good at coordination – and so this is one challenge we have had to face. One of the lessons we learned from the United Kingdom (UK) is that you are more likely to have an impact if you focus on a few things, and the UK established a Delivery Unit in the Office of the Prime Minister to do this.
In 2009 we started to think through what would be the key areas we should focus on, and defining the targets we should aim for. In January 2010, we agreed on 12 whole-of-government outcomes (which included outcomes such as health, education, crime, rural development etc.) and also established a Department of Performance M&E which would take forward this process – our version of the Delivery Unit.
I understand that you will get a detailed introduction to this approach as it forms the core focus of the South African case study that will be presented here. We have gone a long way in developing plans for these 12 outcomes, which bring together the different departments and levels of government to achieve the impacts our citizens need. In operationalising the approach, one of the major issues that confront us is coordination.
In response Implementation Forums have been established for each outcome to bring together stakeholders to drive these outcomes. Some of these Forums work better than others. Sometimes departments are really try to solve implementation problems, in other cases they try to hide issues within the process.
I raise these challenges as I want to encourage an open and frank discussion about what is working in M&E and what isn’t, rather than all of us feeling that we have to present a glossy picture of what is happening in our countries. It is only by us being honest that we can face common challenges and learn how to do things in a better way.
When a South African delegation visited Malaysia last year, we were most impressed about the single-minded determination of the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office (Idries Shah) to focus on solving problems. You will hear about this from John Toh who hosted us who we are very pleased to see has been able to join us.
So I humbly urge you in your presentations and your discussions, to talk about your successes but also the key challenges which are impediments in achieving what you would like to achieve – perhaps one of the countries present here has also faced those problems and has some lessons which can assist.
Our mandate has developed in a number of directions, and I know my Director-General gave you a briefing this morning, and some of you also had nearly an hour with different sections of the Department to talk through some of the key issues we are trying to address, and how. Allow me to add to this, by providing from a political perspective how we see our system unfolding.
One area that emerged as a priority was the active monitoring of front-line services – if our front-line services are not having an impact or making a difference for our people, they will rightfully be dissatisfied. These are the core set of services which, for most people, are the main things they are looking for from government. Our monitoring is a practical demonstration that the Presidency, and Provincial Offices of the Premier want to know how services are working directly and not just through reports.
So we go out on unannounced visits to all parts of the country, showing citizens and our front line public servants that what they do matters, and they must do it well, creatively seeking to find ways to serve people better. Not an easy job! Even in South Africa, which is somewhat better resourced than many countries, we have lots of problems with not enough staff for delivery and with a non-helpful attitude amongst many. Most often this is reflected in, for example, erratic drug supplies, with workbooks that don’t reach schools, with teachers that are not always in the classroom etc.
Another political priority has been about improving the management of government departments. Again we have learned from others, notably Canada, in developing a Management Performance Assessment Tool (MPAT). Through this departments undertake a self-assessment of their management strengths and to identify areas they need to strengthen. This is being expanded across government as we speak.
One of the most recent additions to our toolkit has been evaluation, and we had our National Evaluation Policy Framework adopted by Cabinet on the 23 November 2011. We learned immensely from a visit we undertook to Mexico, Colombia and the US, and I am pleased to see that we have a colleague from Colombia with us today. We have started with some initial evaluations of which the first is on Early Childhood Development.
The findings of this evaluation are being presented at a conference the same days as this workshop. We are already providing significant access to early childhood care and education through Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres. This evaluation is pointing to the need for us to emphasise more the non-educational aspects of early childhood development, particularly issues such as nutrition and immunisation in the period from conception to age 2.
We still have 18% of our children who are stunted, a reflection of the fact that, despite our apparent wealth, many of our people still live in poverty. We are now developing our evaluation system, have defined a set of 6 types of evaluation, are developing the guidelines, training courses to support this, and in fact have just selected the 10 priority evaluations we want to undertake in 2012/13, which will go to Cabinet for approval in May, part of what we are calling a National Evaluation Plan. After each evaluation departments will be required to produce improvement plans, which will be monitored.
Underlying all this is data, and so we have a section concerned with ensuring the right data is available to support our monitoring and our evaluation. We have a system called the Programme of Action which brings together the data on the outcomes – and some of you will have seen this morning. In our experience, the quality of the data continues to be an issue that needs to be addressed.
To do this, we are cooperating with Statistics South Africa and other departments, to ensure that the basic data is available for us to monitor and evaluate effectively. This is a huge and on-going challenge and we have established sectoral data forums to discuss with departments data issues.
The next step is making the changes that our M&E shows up are needed. In this area, there is much to be done to move government beyond traditional bureaucratic approaches to ensure that we provide quality services, and embark on a process of continuous improvement. Not all want this – some prefer their comfort zones, and the arrogance of feeling superior to their clients, the citizens. We have no option but to change this culture.
So what are some of the messages I would like to leave you with. Firstly we are in this together and hence in a collective process of discovering how to use M&E effectively to improve performance. This means making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, learning from the experience of others so we don’t reinvent wheels. We are young in this game although moving at quite a pace.
I have mentioned a number of examples of where we have learned from other countries. All too often we Africans learn from outside the Continent – we must use this opportunity to identify areas where we can share experience within the Continent, despite the challenges of languages and inadequate communication links. I hope that resulting from this event we will find a number of areas where we can share experience in smaller and bigger ways. I am hopeful that you will all find practical opportunities to collaborate, to share our experience, tools and methodologies such as:
- Countries sharing guidelines and training courses
- People from different countries participating in each other’s evaluations
- Sharing of the use of technology
- Countries providing inputs into each other’s methodologies and tools
If I have time I will join you for some of the case study presentations and I look forward to joining you this evening in more informal settings over dinner, and to hear your final learnings on the Thursday. With these few words, allow me to again encourage you to have frank and honest debates and share your challenges as well as your successes and learnings.
I thank you and wish you all well with the workshop and your brief stay in our wonderful and hospitable city and country.
