Keynote address by Minister Jeff Radebe on the occasion of the third International Knowledge Sharing Workshop hosted by the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation in partnership with the World Bank, Cape Town
Greetings ladies and gentlemen, and all protocols observed.
Let me start by extending a word of gratitude for the support received from the World Bank South Africa, represented here by the Country Director, Dr Asad Alam, and the Lead Public Sector Governance Specialist and Cluster Leader, Dr Kathrin Plangemann. Allow me to extend a special word of welcome and greetings to the delegates from fellow African countries who are participants in this workshop.
I acknowledge, in alphabetic order, the presence of the following countries: Botswana, Comoros, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. We sincerely appreciate your attendance, as without your presence in this workshop it wouldn't have its international character and consequently the far reaching impact we hope it will have on our various development programmes.
For us this platform is important for promoting knowledge sharing and peer learning as a way of mutual capacity development. We are acknowledging that as South Africa we would benefit even more in the areas of planning, monitoring, evaluation and public sector governance by sharing knowledge from the experiences of our counterparts from across Africa and globally.
Such multi-stakeholder conversations enriches the insight into our work; as all parties are in a position to listen, learn, and appreciate each other's particular circumstances, context and rationale for the strategic choices made. I am encouraging all participants to feel free to ask in-depth questions and engage in constructive critical discussions in this forum.
This workshop takes place in a year when the global community takes stock of the progress made in achieving the Millennium Development Goals that sought to half poverty by the year 2015. This is the year in which that ambitious programme and its goals were meant to be achieved.
As you will know, much of the world poverty is due to the underdevelopment of the African continent. Years of slavery, colonialism and in our case, apartheid have engendered poverty amongst the majority of our people throughout the continent.
The leading lights of our freedom called for a united Africa that is self-reliant. These objectives are yet to be achieved because wars persist in parts of the continent and disease, unemployment, poverty, inequality and under-development are the reality that is experienced by many of our people.
The challenge that the African continent continues to experience is the radical transformation that was expected by the masses of our people as they celebrated freedom from the chains of colonialism and apartheid. Our challenge in this workshop is to share knowledge from our respective countries of how national planning can contribute towards driving radical socio-economic transformation and sustainable development.
By radical economic transformation, we mean drastic, widespread and qualitative changes that would bring hope that Africa will never be, as former President Mandela declared during his inauguration, be "the skunk of the world”.
Let me now turn my attention to planning. Planning is a broad field, ranging from the high-level and long-term to detailed day-to-day operational planning. This means that, throughout government, a broad range of plans are produced.
This can create an impression of an overwhelming array of plans and suggest a degree of incoherence. However, it is important to bear in mind that these plans serve distinctive purposes and that different aspects of planning need to be dealt with at different levels depending on the strategic importance and level of operational detail required.
The challenge is to ensure that we do not lose sight of the distinctive roles of these different plans. Too often planning becomes about duplicating material across different documents and in the process undermining the potential value of the planning process. This can result in a degree of cynicism.
At one level, planning is about tapping into the conscience of the nation, its ambitions and aspirations and weaving a narrative that gives hope, builds confidence and reassures that the challenges the nation faces are not insurmountable. Planning is also about inspiring a nation and turning despair into possibilities. At another level, planning must deal with details that are necessary to drive implementation.
Lessons from international experience suggest that planning often fulfils the visionary, strategic, adaptive and technocratic roles. Different plans contribute to different parts of these roles.
Visionary planning provides a long-term perspective and a common vision that different stakeholders can mobilise around. While a vision is partly aspirational, its credibility depends on the plan providing sufficient detail to be seen as credible and plausible. Visionary planning may make use of scenarios and projections to focus attention on the likely future consequences of policy decisions.
Strategic planning grounds a high-level vision in specific choices and trade-offs. It is an important element in linking a long-term vision to current actions and policy choices, particularly for areas with long lead times.
Adaptive planning focuses on working through specific problems and challenges in order to ensure effective implementation. The need for adaptive planning arises from the complexity of many government activities where effective implementation depends upon on-going learning from experience and making improvements during the process of implementation.
Adaptive planning has received increased attention in recent years and focuses on the dynamic and iterative interaction between planning and implementation.
Technocratic planning provides the details of how implementation will take place; for example, through the preparation of operational plans. Governments often neglect this dimension of planning, which is one of the reasons why visionary and strategic plans can remain unimplemented.
South Africa has different plans that perform the different roles discussed above. I will not discuss each of them as other presentation will cover these in detail.
In 2012, we adopted the National Development Plan (the NDP) and Vision 2030 as our long-term plan that articulates a range of policy goals and aspirations towards overcoming the triple challenges of unemployment, poverty and inequality facing our people. This is the plan that serves the visionary function.
At the start of the current administration we developed and adopted the Medium-Term Strategic Framework (the MTSF), as the five-year plan of this government administration that seeks to implement the long-term NDP. The MTSF fulfils the strategic planning role. The MTSF translates the NDP into more concrete outcomes, indicators and targets.
It is at the level of MTSF that the link between planning, performance monitoring, evaluation and budgeting becomes critical for effective implementation. In order to overcame the triple challenges of poverty, unemployment and inequality by 2030 as identified in the NDP, in our MTSF 2014-2019 we are placing high emphasis and focus on improving the following priority outcomes:
1. Quality basic education
2. A long and health life for all South Africans
3. All people in South Africa are and feel safe
4. Decent employment through inclusive growth
5. A skilled and capable workforce to support an inclusive growth path
6. An efficient, competitive and responsive economic infrastructure network
7. Vibrant, equitable, sustainable rural communities contributing to food security for all
8. Sustainable human settlements and improved quality of household life
9. Responsive, accountable, effective, efficient local government
10. Protect and enhance our environmental assets and natural resources
11. Create a better South Africa and contribute to a better Africa and a better world
12. An efficient, effective and development oriented public service
13. A comprehensive, responsive and sustainable social protection system
14. A diverse, socially cohesive society with a common national identity
These 14 outcomes form the strategic agenda of our government in relation to ensuring socio-economic transformation and building a capable state that plays its leadership role in contributing towards the achievement of our developmental goals. In doing this, we are firmly guided by the Constitution of the Republic that embodies values and principles upon which our young democracy is built.
Since 2009 delivery agreements have been produced for each of government's 12 (now 14) outcomes. The delivery agreements are cross-cutting plans that bring together the key departments that share responsibility for specific priorities.
Some provinces produce medium to long-term provincial development plans that set out the core developmental priorities of the province.
Municipal integrated development plans are the main statutory planning instrument at municipal level and set out the core developmental objectives for the period of each administration. Municipalities also produce annual service delivery budget implementation plans (which are the equivalent of departmental annual performance plans (APPs).
The Public Service Regulations require each department to prepare a strategic plan "stating the department's core objectives, based on Constitutional and other legislative mandates, functional mandates and the service delivery improvement programme”.
Departments are also required to produce annual performance plans setting out the key actions that will be taken each year together with indicators to assist in tracking progress.
In response to identified weaknesses in programme-level planning, DPME developed initial guidelines on programme planning in 2013. These guidelines emphasise the importance of clarifying the logic and approach of an implementation programme, identifying who in the relevant department is responsible for the programme and clarity on the budget allocated to the programme.
Finally, the Public Service Regulations set out a requirement for each department to have a service delivery improvement plan and to publish annually its commitments on service standards and how these will be achieved.
Good plans are the basis for effective monitoring and evaluation to hold those tasked with implementing development programmes accountable. Without good plans, monitoring is rendered that much more difficult. South Africa has these various plans but their quality varies markedly, resulting in poor implementation.
As we continue to celebrate twenty years of freedom and democracy, we are proud of the progress made in improving people's lives in terms of the delivery of free social services like clean drinking water, sanitation, housing and other infrastructure, electricity, basic education, primary health care, social grants, and job opportunities, among other successes.
We are not content with these gains since evidence shows us that, in line with the words of the founding President of our free and democratic South Africa, former President Nelson Mandela: "After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.”
We still have to improve the quality of basic services, strength the capacity of the public sector institutions to perform better and unblock blockages that impede economic growth and socio-economic development.
Some of you may have been aware of the socio-economic consequences of poor service delivery in many instances at our local government levels leading to what has become known in local lingo as "service delivery protests”. Some of the main challenges we face at this tier of government is the shortage of skills, inadequate revenue collection by the local government and also corruption.
All these challenges delay the achievement of the goals set out in our National Development Plan. From both planning on the one hand and monitoring and evaluation on the other, we need to arrest the scourge of these challenges in order to render effective local governance and by extension the successful implementation of the NDP.
It is our stance that in all our transformation work, the local government sphere is where our policies find practical expression. The socio-economic conditions of all our people are the indicator of the successful implementation, or lack thereof, of the MTSF and the NDP.
In the February 2015 State of the Nation Address, His Excellency, President Jacob Zuma, rallied the South African society to jointly implement a nine-point plan to boost the economy, among other things. We are very determined to do our level best in facilitating implementation of these initiatives and ensuring positive impact to our people.
For instance, we have adopted the innovative Malaysian model on high impact economic intervention, that we call Operation Phakisa, to ensure detailed operational planning, monitoring and intervention in targeted sectors such as the ocean economy and health systems.
Ladies and gentlemen, you already have a workshop programme at your disposal, which covers two-and-a-half days, whereby representatives from my Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation will - over and above the NDP and MTSF that I have briefly alluded to before - present on a range initiatives such as:
- The work on translating NDP and MTSF into strategic plans and annual performance plans of all government departments
- Links between these plans and budgeting
- Programme planning
- Outcomes monitoring and the programme of action system
- Performance monitoring of frontline service delivery and citizen feedback
- Assessment of management practices across national and provincial departments as well as municipalities
- The National Evaluation System.
I am delighted that the workshop programme includes presentations from our provincial spheres of government, as this aptly demonstrates the importance of a national seamless transformation programme in moving South Africa forward!
I am sure that the agenda items on international experiences will be of great interest to the South African context, as we need more ideas about how to continuously improve our work informed by global best practice.
Again, I wish you all a fruitful Third International Knowledge Sharing Workshop on National Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation.
Thank you!
