Programme director
Director General for Performance Monitoring and Evaluation
Fellow Monitoring & Evaluation practitioners across the continent
Development partners
Representatives from Malaysia, Colombia and the United States.
As we gather here today in the City of Tshwane, 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, German Agency GIZ, World Bank and the CLEAR Initiative, our peers from Malaysia, Colombia and the United States.
You are most welcome to our country and hope that your experience and interaction with the people of South Africa will be a memorable one. We pride ourselves as a country Inspiring New Ways. Much of what you are going to experience at this workshop will be our unique new ways of doing things that seeks to improve the lives of our people.
We are proud to host this international workshop on performance monitoring and evaluation, and to focus on experiences from within our continent. It is indeed time for the continent to take the lead and decisive steps to eradicate poverty and underdevelopment. The idea for this initiative first arose in 2009 and follows discussions I have had with my Burundian counterpart on sharing our experiences.
I am certain that he would also be most pleased, as I am, to see that our commitment to building our monitoring and evaluation systems through active cross-country experiences has come to be realised through this event. It is hence my sincere hope that this is the start of an ongoing conversation between our countries about how we make performance monitoring and evaluation not an administrative burden, but a way to ensure a continuous improvement in our public services. A way also to make greater impacts on our citizens and better value for money from government expenditure.
Our work on performance monitoring and evaluation systems is about bringing 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 both promises and peril, and has implications for how both government and corporates see and fulfill their responsibilities to society and the environment.
Economically, Africa's collective Gross Domestic Products (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, and 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 must adequately respond to 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 things.
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 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, although the concepts have been part of the work of government for a long time.
The specific focus on performance monitoring and evaluation as a key tool to improve the performance and impact of government was reinforced with the administration of President Jacob 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 the following non-negotiable principles:
- Provide decisive leadership and make tough decisions that may be required to deliver on our mandate.
- Strengthen our ability to cooperate 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.
- We must 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 continued to say, "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 learners read and write. In health, we must measure whether people are living longer and 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 impact 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 experience is that you are more likely to have an impact if you focus on a few things. They established a Delivery Unit in the Office of the Prime Minister to undertake this work.
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 government outcomes against our five priorities namely health, education, fight against crime and corruption, rural development and creation of jobs. We also established a Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation which would take forward this process – our version of the Delivery Unit.
We have gone a long way in developing and implementing these plans for these 12 outcomes, in the process bringing together the different departments and levels of government to achieve the impact 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 trying to solve implementation problems, in other cases they try to avoid salient 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.
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. Hence in your presentations you have been asked to say what you would like to learn from others.
Our mandate has developed in a number of directions, and I know our 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. 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. Our view is that 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.
In practice, 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.
Another one of our priorities 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).
Using these departments we undertake a self-assessment to identify their management strengths and 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 in November last year.
We have started with some initial evaluations of which the first is on Early Childhood Development (ECD). As a country, we are already providing significant access to early childhood care and education through 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 the age of two.
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 and we are developing the guidelines and training courses to support this.
In fact we have just selected the 10 priority evaluations we want to undertake in the next financial year, which will go to Cabinet for approval in May, as 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 might 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.
In conclusion, we collectively have to discover how to use Monitoring & Evaluation 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 ground-breaking change, 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, and we must use this opportunity today to identify areas where we can share experience among ourselves.
I hope that resulting from this workshop 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.
With these few words, allow me to once 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 well with the workshop and your brief stay in our wonderful and hospitable city and country. I hope you will find an opportunity to also explore this city and experience what we do to uniquely inspire new ways.
I thank you.
