Chairperson of the Parliamentary Appropriations Committee, Hon. Mr Sogoni
The Director-General of the Department of PME, Mr Sean Phillips
Colleagues and participants.
It gives me pleasure to welcome you at this workshop.
Firstly let me tender an apology on behalf of the Hon Minister Collins Chabane who was assigned by the President to travel to South Sudan.
I also want to thank the Members of Parliament for making the time to attend the workshop during Parliamentary recess.
Introduction and background:
Performance monitoring and evaluation has been implemented in various ways in many other countries around the world for several decades. There is also a considerable body of international literature on monitoring and evaluation, covering both the theory and practice of Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) in government. M&E has become one of the pillars in the body of knowledge on public management.
Since 2009, this Administration has introduced a strong emphasis on M&E, as illustrated by the creation of the department. However, performance monitoring and evaluation is relatively new in South Africa.
For this reason, we thought it worthwhile to spend part of this workshop discussing the theory of M&E and looking at some of the international experiences of countries such as Colombia and Malaysia. In this regard, I would like to extend a warm welcome to our colleagues Stephen Porter and Sulley Gariba from the international organisation called the Centres for Learning on Evaluation and Results (CLEAR), who will be assisting us by providing us with some of this background information during the workshop. Sulley Gariba, who is also a presidential advisor in Ghana, will be joining us later this morning.
While it is useful to learn from international experiences, it is of course not possible to simply implant M&E practices which have worked elsewhere into our unique constitutional, political, institutional and social context in South Africa. We have to find our own ways of using M&E to improve the performance of government, we should find ways that will work in our unique environment.
We are on a journey in South Africa, for which we know our ultimate destination – in short, a developmental, capable and performing state. We also know that performance monitoring and evaluation is one of the main vehicles for getting to this destination. However, there are many possible routes that we can take in our PME vehicle, and no-one can know for sure beforehand, which is the best route to take.
One of the lessons from international experience is that performance monitoring and evaluation systems must be introduced very carefully in order to avoid unintended consequences. For example, there was an article from the Observer Newspaper in the UK in your reading packs (which were distributed before the workshop) which indicates that inappropriate target setting in the National Health System that may have resulted in hundreds of unintended deaths.
I would therefore like to encourage you to approach this workshop with the understanding that we are all on a learning curve. None of us has all the answers now. But it is very important that we have this kind of workshop, so that we can share knowledge and debate and discuss the issues, and so that we can move forward towards our destination based on informed and carefully thought-through decisions.
With those few words, I would like to welcome you all to the workshop, and sincerely wish that you find it a fruitful experience.
I thank you all.
