Opening SAMEA Biannual Conference, by Hon Buti Manamela, Deputy Minister of planning, Monitoring and Evaluation
Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, Commissioner of the Public Service Commission, partners from other African countries, colleagues from civil society, academia, and government.
It gives me great pleasure to open this SAMEA Conference marking the 10th anniversary of the founding of SAMEA. And how fitting it is that it is in the year of the International Year of Evaluation. My Minister launched EvalYear in March, and this represents one of the final activities in the year in South Africa.
The Conference is called Using Evaluation to Improve People’s Lives – very appropriate, because M&E should not just be another administrative procedure, another technical requirement to make jobs for bureaucrats and NGOs – it must make a difference.
Government is very committed to using M&E in this spirit, hence the creation of the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, its focus on the National Development Plan and the priority outcomes. And I know that many of the evaluations that are being showcased at SAMEA demonstrate that impact. For example the awards later this evening include evaluations which have demonstrated their uptake and use.
But what is so impressive about SAMEA is the partnership it demonstrates between academia, the private sector, and government – all determined that M&E should make a difference, and improve people’s lives.
That partnership is demonstrated in a number of ways – in the organisation of this Conference, the largest M&E conference on the African Continent, in the special edition of the African Evaluation Journal that is being launched later, in the development of evaluation standards, in the work underway on professionalization. And all of us need a strong SAMEA that is able to take forward the interests of the discipline to improve its professionalism, and to increase its use and impact.
Of course evaluation is about evidence – using rigorous evidence so that we understand how programmes and policies are working, and how they can be strengthened. It is also about accountability and I know that work is happening with the National Assembly, hence the important role that the Deputy Speaker, Honourable Lechesa Tsenoli, is playing this evening.
There are some important streams that will be carried through this conference:
- Public sector
- Made in Africa
- Professionalisation of evaluation
- Emerging evaluators
- M&E advocacy and results
- Technology for M&E
- Connecting evaluators and evaluation futures
We must find our own African approaches to M&E, and while we can learn from others we must adapt and apply to our own context, as has happened with the national evaluation system, where we drew from the experience of Mexico and Colombia. So I am intrigued by the Made in Africa stream – and what approaches and tools this showcases. I invite our colleagues from SAMEA to brief me. I see presentations from a number of countries, and I know that our partners in the emerging Twende Mbele African M&E Partnership are with us today. Welcome colleagues.
And M&E is important in wider society – hence the importance of the stream on M&E Advocacy. As you know I am responsible for youth and I see the presentation on “Changing the livelihoods of youth and their community through innovative youth unemployment interventions: the case of Harambee’’. This is an important intervention and I look forward to reading the paper.
Evaluation is expanding – many departments are now busy developing departmental evaluation plans. My department is expecting that 200 evaluations a year will be done across government in five years’ time. And what about evaluations in the NGO sector, and the private sector? But where are the evaluators going to come from to do all these evaluations? Hence the importance of the streams on Emerging Evaluators, and Professionalisation of Evaluation. We need to bring in new people, and build the capacity of existing evaluators. We need the few strong evaluation companies to partner with others, and mentor emerging evaluators. We need universities and Science Councils to see evaluation as an important discipline and to train their staff not just to do research, but evaluation.
I see there will be discussion of an Emerging Evaluators coaching and mentoring programme. These sort of initiatives are very important – adults learn through doing and so formal training is much less effective than on-the-job training, ie learning by doing. But how can we help the universities that provide the critical postgraduate education in M&E to increase their throughput?
We must also be clever – technology provides so many opportunities for data to be collected and analysed immediately. How also can we use our administrative data cleverly to assist us in understanding what is happening. The Grade R impact evaluation undertaken by Stellenbosch University shows how by bringing together data on learning outcomes (the ANA assessments), SNAP data on schools, and Grade R registration data we were able very cheaply to analyse the impact that Grade R is having on learning outcomes. So how can we improve the quality and accessibility of the data we collect all the time, from birth registration, to schools, to clinics, social worker visits etc. We don’t need to ponderously analyse a lot of this data now – we can enter data and have it analysed immediately.
We have learnt from others and been good students – we have taken on a variety of systems and implemented them courageously and thoroughly. I can confirm that from Cabinet’s point of view we are very committed to using M&E information to improve our performance. Evaluations are often discussed for an hour, reflecting the seriousness with which they are taken. What South Africa is doing in M&E is now an example to others. This is a ‘good story to tell’.
So I hope you have some very effective deliberations, and this helps to strengthen this very important partnership between civil society, academia, the private sector and government. Make sure you learn from each other and you come up with suggestions for how M&E can be taken forward in South Africa and more widely over the next few years.
The battle to improve our people’s lives continues – a luta continua.
