Chairperson
Honourable Members
Chairperson of the Committee
Deputy Minister for Performance Monitoring and Evaluation, Ms Dina Pule
Director-General of the Department, Dr Sean Phillips
Senior management and staff of the department present
Invited guests
It is on a sad note that this inaugural budget vote is delivered while the country mourns the passing away of a heroine of our people and a stalwart Mama Albertina Sisulu. Mama Sisulu strived for a South Africa that is just, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic. She wanted our people to lead a better life and her contribution to our society is immeasurable. This budget vote is dedicated to the fruitful life she lived and shared with all of us. May her soul rest in peace!
Today we also deliver this inaugural budget vote during Youth Month a month dedicated to youth development. The 16 of June this year marks the 35th anniversary of the Soweto and related Uprisings of 1976. It is the month in which young people braved all odds to fight for equal and quality education for all. It is also against this background that education is among the five key priorities of government of which the youth of 1976 fought for.
We today deliver the first budget vote of the newly formed Department for Performance Monitoring and Evaluation in The Presidency following the allocation of an independent vote to the department as from the 1 April 2011.
Let me take this opportunity to also welcome the Deputy Minister for Performance Monitoring and Evaluation, Ms Dina Pule to the Performance Monitoring and Evaluation (PME) family whose appointment has enhanced and brought new energy to the work of the department. The Deputy Minister brings to the family her extensive experience in government coupled with passion for service delivery to our people. Both the Deputy Minister and myself look forward to a fruitful working relationship with Parliament in the delivery of our mandate.
Honourable Members, we are of the view that monitoring and evaluation has the potential to make a very significant contribution to good governance. However, the realisation of this potential is dependent on the way in which the monitoring and evaluation mechanisms are designed and implemented.
Good intentions are not enough – badly designed monitoring and evaluation initiatives often result in more negative than positive consequences. Our system is based on negotiated and agreed upon processes, outputs and targets within government.
In my address to the House last year, I introduced a position paper titled “Improving Government Performance: Our approach”. The position paper clarifies our mandate with regard to the outcomes approach. Over the past year we have made good progress with the implementation of the outcomes approach, but before describing this progress in more detail, I should mention that we are now engaged in two additional mandates.
With regard to the outcomes approach, the process has involved the entire government agreeing on a limited set of outcomes as strategic focus areas for the whole government. We also developed the whole-of-government plans, or delivery agreements, for each of the outcomes. The main aim of the outcomes approach is to improve planning, implementation and coordination between the three spheres of government with regard to cross-cutting priorities.
The outcomes approach is therefore concerned with monitoring and evaluating the performance of the government as a whole. In addition to the outcomes approach, we are monitoring performance at the level of individual departments and municipalities, and at the level of service delivery on the ground, or what we call the front-line service delivery.
Cutting across these three levels, we have a mandate to promote good performance monitoring and evaluation practices across government, which includes the development of improved administrative data systems.
I am now pleased to present progress we have recorded to date and our future plans in each of these areas.
Starting with the outcomes approach, we have worked with other departments to identify the outputs required to achieve the twelve outcomes, and to set targets for measurable indicators of progress. The President has also signed performance agreements with all Ministers based on the outcomes and targets. National and provincial departments and municipalities were engaged in a consultative process to develop detailed delivery agreements for each of the outcomes. These delivery agreements were all completed and signed by November last year.
The delivery agreements describe the outputs, activities, and inputs required to achieve the outcomes, set targets for measurable performance indicators, and identify the roles and responsibilities of individual departments both national and provincial including municipalities. The delivery agreements are a major achievement in that, for the first time, we have a set of inter-departmental and intergovernmental strategic plans for key cross-cutting outcomes.
The process of producing these plans or delivery agreements was itself useful, in that it resulted in a higher level of understanding of the challenges which other departments face, and how the work of the different departments affect each other.
We have since published the new programme of action based on delivery agreements on both the government and Presidency websites, and to date they reflect nine of the twelve delivery agreements.
The other three delivery agreements, for the health, rural development and employment outcomes, are currently in the process of being captured on the system. Final work is being done on the detailed targets and indicators for the health and rural development outcomes, and adjustments are being made to the employment delivery agreement to ensure that it adequately reflects the commitments made recently in the New Growth Path.
Honourable Members, as we have committed the implementation of the delivery agreements are monitored by Cabinet itself. In this regard, we have instituted a process of quarterly reporting to Cabinet by the outcome coordinating Ministers. I am pleased to announce that the first reports were assessed by Cabinet during February and March this year as a pilot. We are now ready to consider the second set of reports this month, the contents of which will be used to update the programme of action on the website. This is an important step for the public to be able to monitor progress and hold government accountable.
The quarterly reports focus on key results, challenges and the required changes and interventions. The quarterly reports therefore ensure that Cabinet regularly focuses on assessing progress with the achievement of the key priorities of government. Some of the highlights per outcome from the first set of quarterly reports were:
1. In basic education, we have seen the finalisation of the teacher development plan, the development of standard workbooks in literacy and numeracy aimed at learners in Grades one to six and preparation and roll out of the Annual National Assessments.
2. In the critical area of health, of note has been the progress in the immunisation of children against polio and measles. The country response to HIV and AIDS has been very successful, with large numbers of people tested for HIV and at least 1.3 million people placed on treatment. Tuberculosis diagnosis and management is also improving.
3. With regard to the outcome on safety and security, we have seen good progress in reducing the number of targeted serious crimes such as murder, rape and bank robberies. The number of police personnel has been significantly increased and a number of additional regional and district courts have been established. The latter has led to a marked reduction in backlog of cases.
4. With the adoption of the New Growth Path, new impetus has been given to the outcome on employment and inclusive growth. Public works programmes have gained momentum with 388 thousand work opportunities created between 1 April and 30 September 2010, plus the 90 thousand individuals on the Community Work Programme.
5. In the outcome on skills the emphasis has been on drafting qualifications standards, gazetting of new programmes, discussions with business, review of policy and regulations and enrolment planning. Tangible improvements can be witnessed in enrolment at Further Education and Training colleges and the number of artisans trained, albeit not yet at the desired pace.
6. Economic infrastructure development also notched up some important achievements with the development and approval by Cabinet of the Integrated Resource Plan and the Independent Systems Market Operator Bill to stimulate greater private investment in electricity generation. Importantly over 100 000 additional poor households were given electricity connections. Additionally, six regional bulk water projects have been constructed, eight dams have been rehabilitated and over 3000 water license applications have been finalised.
The achievement of all the outcomes requires an efficient, effective and development-orientated public service. In this regard, centre of government departments have identified a number of areas to focus on improving the management capacity of government. The planning and budgeting processes of government have been aligned to the outcomes approach.
Building on recent improvements in service delivery at the Department of Home Affairs, there is now focus on reducing waiting times for pensions, hospital queues, licensing centres and social grants. In addition, departments are being supported to put in place service delivery standards and to develop and implement service delivery improvement plans.
These are some of the indications that we are indeed significantly changing how government works as we have committed. The Deputy Minister will later address you on progress made in some of the outcomes and the work we are doing in monitoring frontline services.
Of course, the implementation of an initiative as ambitious as the outcomes approach has not been without challenges, and all of us, including Parliament, need to work together to address these challenges. Our engagements in relation to similar processes in other countries indicate that these challenges are not unique to us in South Africa.
Firstly, South Africa is no different to the rest of the world in its struggle to achieve real “joined-up government”. The delivery agreements represent an important step forward in the process of moving towards more integrated government, but we still have a long way to go in this process.Full integration requires the development of a new culture in government, a culture which recognises that real coordination involves a negotiation process in which all sides need to make compromises.
In this regard, it is important that the strategic plans which departments submit to Parliament should reflect their roles and responsibilities and targets as agreed to in the various delivery agreements. All departmental strategic plans should indicate how their work contributes to the various outcomes, how it impacts on outcomes such as employment and the environment, and how it has been planned with consideration of the objectives of other departments in mind.
We have said that given our limited resources we have to ensure that the state is prudent with its budget. Many of the quarterly reports mentioned funding constraints, and there is a need for greater consensus across government on the difficult choices which have to be made so that we can achieve our key objectives within our budgetary and other resource constraints.
Secondly, the implementation of an outcomes-based approach requires the development of a new management culture and management capacities in government. Our public service is only just starting to grapple with the concepts and methodologies of results-based management, such as using theories of change and logic models to thoroughly and systematically think through the relationships between activities, outputs, outcomes and impacts.
In addition, results-based management requires government to have a minimum level of information management systems in place, in order to produce the required data for analysis. In many departments, these systems are not yet in place and the required data is not yet available. We have established sectoral data forums to work on this issue. As a result of the lack of good quality data, there is room for improvement in the quality of the delivery agreements and the quarterly progress reports which are being submitted to Cabinet.
The outcomes approach is therefore itself a catalyst to improving the performance of government, in that it requires public service managers to engage in activities such as results-based planning, the measurement of key performance indicators, and analysis of the reasons why targets are not being met.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, we are grappling with the challenge of balancing the need to coordinate, standardise and drive the outcomes approach from the Presidency at the centre of government on the one hand, with the need to ensure that departments take real ownership of the approach on the other hand. One of the common perverse effects of performance measurement is that there is a tendency for managers to focus on compliance with externally imposed performance management systems, as opposed to taking ownership of the system and using it to improve the performance of their departments.
Honourable members, we will only be able to say that the outcomes approach has been successful if we can move beyond compliance and if most of the managers in our departments and municipalities have taken ownership of the approach.
We have committed to involve all the key role players in the process of producing the delivery agreements, but we have not been very successful. In this regard, we have started to engage in discussions with a national non-governmental organisation umbrella body and other representatives of organised civil society with a view to finding a suitable way of involving organisations outside government in those outcomes in which they play a key role.
Honourable Members, I will now turn to the monitoring of performance of individual departments and municipalities. This is one of the outputs in the outcome 12 delivery agreement, and is part of the process of ensuring that government has the capacity to achieve the outcomes.
We have developed and piloted the implementation of a standard Performance Assessment Tool, to be used to assess the performance of national and provincial departments and municipalities. Since then we have been working with the Offices of the Premier, National Treasury, Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA), the Auditor General, and the Public Service Commission to develop the tool.
The tool will utilise the results of existing assessment mechanisms developed by National Treasury, DPSA and Public Service Commission. The tool involves a combination of self-assessment and independent assessment by our department or the Offices of the Premier. We are also working with the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government to pilot the application of the tool to municipalities in that province.
We have also piloted the process of applying the tool in the Presidency, National Treasury and the DPSA, and we are currently working with the Office of the Premier in Mpumalanga for them to pilot the application of the tool to the departments in the province. We are now at the stage of going back to Cabinet with proposals for wide-spread application of the assessment tool.
The focus of the tool is on the quality of the management practices in a department, including areas such as financial management, human resource management, supply chain management, strategic management and governance. The assessments draw on Auditor General reports, but provide a broader picture of managing performance. The tool establishes benchmarks for management of performance and measures departments against these benchmarks. Application of the tool assists managers to identify areas where improvements are required.
It will also enable the Presidency and the Offices of the Premier to focus on additional actions and support to improve the performance of such departments.
A decision has been taken to link the performance assessment of heads of department to the results of performance assessments of their departments in future, and we are currently working with the DPSA and the Public Service Commission on an implementation plan in this regard.
Honourable members, during the elections we have noted with concern the quality of delivery of infrastructure in municipalities and by government in general. As a department we are working together with National Treasury on a mechanism to monitor holistically the implementation of infrastructure delivery by government at all levels. The monitoring which will include sanitation provision includes physical verification of provided data by government departments rather than reliance of reports. This process is designed to avoid what we have noticed with discovery of open toilets.
Cabinet has decided to put local government as a standing item on its agenda so that we can monitor performance from a national level on a regular basis. In addition, the President will engage Premiers on how to improve the monitoring of the performance of municipalities, in terms of Section 139 of the Constitution.
While municipalities are settling with new leadership at the helm, we have to begin the implementation of the local government delivery agreement. The main thrust of the agreement is to achieve a responsive, accountable, effective and efficient local government system.
The outcome has a number of key pillars. One of them is the recognition that municipalities are not the same. They are different in terms of their capacities, their revenue base, population size, size of the economy and their broader social context. When supporting municipalities to improve performance, national government will take this into account and not adopt a “one size fits all” approach which does not work.
Other key pillars include strengthening the administrative and financial capability of municipalities to ensure greater transparency, fighting corruption, promoting good financial management and strengthening community participation. The delivery agreement also emphasises the need to ensure all critical positions are filled by competent and qualified individuals.
Honourable members, we are indeed changing how government works. We cannot afford to fail, we can make mistakes but we should be able to correct them and move on. We owe that to stalwarts who fought for an equal and prosperous society like Mama Sisulu and our people to improve their lives for the better. We must work smarter, faster and effectively within available resources.
Turning to the budget, the department has been allocated R75.79 million for the 2011/12 financial year. Of this, R50 million will be spent on compensation of employees, R21 million on goods and services, and R3 million on payments for capital assets. The department has four budget programmes, which correspond with the four branches of the department, and the budget has been allocated to these programmes as follows:
Administration: R22.54 million
Outcomes monitoring and evaluation: R24.74 million
Integrated Public Performance Data Systems: R21.74 million
Public Sector Administration Oversight: R6.77 million
In conclusion, the department is established and operational and we have made most progress on our mandate. In the coming year we will put more emphasis on performance monitoring of individual departments and monitoring of frontline service delivery on a much larger scale.
Finally, I would like to thank the Deputy Minister, Director-General, and all the staff in the department for their hard work and dedication during the past year.
Honourable Members, it is my pleasure to commend the Budget Vote to the House.
I thank you
