Diagnostic Study of Collaboration Between the State and Civil Society Organization (CSOs) in the Field of Monitoring and Evaluation of Public Policies – Final Report
September 2021
In order to strengthen national Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) systems for better governance in Africa, the Twende Mbele program has focused on strengthening collaboration between governments and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in its partner countries. Indeed, CSOs conduct alternative evaluations, participate in the development and implementation of policies and programs and have information systems that generate evidence that is useful for decision-making and governance.
In Benin, the National Evaluation Policy (PNE) defined the role and place of civil society in the national evaluation system. The NEP stipulates that civil society organizations must be involved in the conduct of evaluations and participate in their conduct. They must be consulted during the process and contribute to the reliability of the evaluation work through their knowledge and expertise in the fields concerned. They will be chosen on the basis of their representativeness and their importance in the sectors concerned and will each be called upon to intervene as far as it is concerned within the limit of the level of participation retained for the circumstance.
More generally, in many African countries, we can observe that CSOs play a crucial role in improving the production and use of evaluation data. Therefore, a framework for sharing and learning between governments and CSOs should make it possible to strengthen the implementation, sustainability and impact of national evaluation systems (NES), thus contributing to the achievement of one of the main objectives of Twende Mbele.
Measuring Government Business Incentive Scheme – Learning Brief
June 2021
The South African government is committed to developing the economy, creating employment, and attracting foreign investment. Investment incentives are used to mitigate against the cost or uncertainty of doing business in South Africa, and to upgrade or sustain production and employment, especially in priority sectors as set out in the NIPF, the NDP, the 9 Point Plan, and the post-COVID Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan (ERRP).
The South African government sees business incentives as an important mechanism to raise competitiveness, address historical inequalities and increase the participation of historically disadvantaged groups in the economy. Investment incentives are viewed according to their typology or the nature of the outcome they are trying to achieve. The following types of investment incentives are typical of the South Africa incentives landscape:
1. Direct financial incentives: Including grants; loans at low interest.
2. Indirect fiscal incentives: including tax rebates and tax holidays.
3.Other non‐fiscal incentives: including regulatory and administrative concessions; and subsidised or reduced service costs.
Country Gender Indicator Framework
November 2020
The Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities (DWYPD) is the custodian and steward of gender policy in South Africa. Its primary role is to develop policy and ensure that the country’s gender priorities, including those arising from national and international commitments, are mainstreamed across the state machinery towards achieving gender equality and better development outcomes for women and girls. To this end, the DWYPD developed a Framework on Gender – Responsive Planning, Budgeting, Monitoring, Evaluation and Auditing (GRPBMEA) that sets out the country’s approach to mainstreaming gender across the public policy cycle. The framework describes the problem statement, provides a comprehensive overview of the policy and legislative landscape, articulates the approach to GRPBMEA and identifies implementation priorities and the roles and responsibilities of critical departments in this regard.
Fundamentally, the GRPBMEA is about turning policy commitments into actions and results by integrating them into government policy cycle. However, policy commitments by themselves are less effective if they are not accompanied by a set of indicators that can be integrated within planning and budgeting instruments and to track and monitor progress against defined targets.
A Framework to Assess What Works, How, And Why
March 2021
This policy brief presents an analytical framework for investigating the effects of interventions aiming to support the use of evidence for decision making. The brief describes the components of the framework and how it has been applied to guide the analysis of evidence-use cases and interventions. The objective of the analytical framework is to provide an inductive analytical tool that can be adapted and applied by all stakeholders in an evidence journey and at different stages to better understand the process and outcome of evidence use. The aim is to facilitate a structured analysis of evidence use in decision making to transfer and compare findings and lessons learnt across contexts. Having used the framework to guide the analysis of the eight case studies presented, the following key messages have been identified:
- An analytical framework for evidence use supports the design and evaluation of interventions and analysis of cases of evidence use.
- Evidence use is not a passive process and the framework provides a versatile analytical tool to guide the active intervention in and facilitation of this process.
The framework suggest three main shifts in thinking about evidence use:
- Centring the decision makers and their demand for evidence as the starting point for evidence use.
- Unpacking evidence use interventions by underlying mechanisms of change.
- Conceptualising evidence use as a behaviour change.
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