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The workshop was designed to enhance the use of evidence to improve development and impact of government policies and programmes. The training sought to expose the participants to some practical strategies and tools for enhancing the policy making value chain as a follow-up to the public sector M&E baseline studies carried out in 2019. The EBPMI workshop sought to enable the participants to;

1. Understand the difference between evidence and opinion and distinguish evidence based decisions and opinion-based decisions.

2. Understand the policy/programme cycle and how evidence can be used and internalized.

3. Understand what the diagnostic phase involves and become familiar with some approaches for understanding a policy problem.

4. Become aware of the different types of research and their usefulness at different points in the EBPM&I cycle.

5. Gain some practical engagement with a diagnosing tool.

6. Obtain a high level overview of various sources of evidence and datasets valuable to practitioners.

7. Deepen their understanding of the factors that influence policy-making and implementation using practical examples, focusing on the relevant lessons for public sector officials.

8. Reflect on how they can apply the use of evidence and learning in their organizations in different time scales and contexts.

Contexte

• 2007 : Mise en place du Bureau d’Évaluation des Politiques Publiques et Institutionnalisation du Système national d’évaluation
• Situation au MAEP : les décisions ne se prenaient pas en général sur la base de données probantes. Par exemple, le Plan Stratégique de Relance du Secteur Agriculture (PSRSA) a été produit en un mois.
• Les organisations de producteurs n’intervenaient pas à des niveaux clés de la chaine de décision
• 2009 : Evaluation de la politique de développement du secteur agricole (PSRSA)
• Les recommandations de l’évaluation de 2009 ont répondu à un besoin latent sur le terrain (Certaines ont été mises en œuvre, d’autres pas.)

The issue of utilization of M&E information is central to the performance and sustainability of an M&E system. Utilization depends on the nature and strength of the demand for M&E information—in other words, on the incentives to use M&E. Countries with little or no demand for M&E may be perceived as facing an insuperable barrier to efforts to build M&E systems, but this perspective is far too pessimistic.

There are ways to increase demand by strengthening incentives to ensure utilization of M&E information. Simply having M&E information available does not guarantee that it will actually be used, whether by program managers in their day-to-day work, by budget officials responsible for advising on spending options, or by a Parliament responsible for accountability oversight. Are there incentives to use M&E information? This webinar discussed incentives to use M&E information for building a robust M&E System.

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are at the center of sound governance arrangements. They are necessary for the achievement of evidence-based policy making, budget decisions, management, and accountability. There is no “best” model of what a government M&E system should look like. Much depends on which of the several potential uses of M&E information constitute the main reasons for building such a system.

But in order for all of this to happen, political buy-in has to be sought and obtained. Demand from governments is crucial for the utilization of M&E information and for the ongoing funding of M&E activities. Thus, it is necessary to secure the buy-in of the key stakeholders such as government ministers or finance ministries if substantive effort is to be put into creating, strengthening, or funding M&E functions. This webinar will explore how political buy-in for M&E looks in different country contexts.

Civil society has a long history of supporting service delivery in Ghana through the provision of financial support, conducting research, providing technical advisory support, designing and implementing projects and other initiatives. The sanitation sector has been a particular area of focus for civil society support because of the poor levels of service delivery and, particularly, inequities in sanitation provision in the country. In 2015, the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP)1 ranked Ghana as the second lowest in the world, with only 15% of the population provided with basic sanitation. These services only reached 1% of the poor, 19% of which practised open defecation (Ntow, 2019; World Health Organisation (WHO) & United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 2017). With the support of civil society and development partners, there have been improvements in basic sanitation service provision, which moved from 15% in 2015 to an estimated 21% in 2018 (Ghana Statistical Service, 2018).

This policy brief draws on the lessons emerging from a case study that explored the role of civil society in promoting the use of evidence in strengthening the performance of the sanitation sector in Ghana. The case focuses on two initiatives promoted by an NGO, the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana): the I Am Aware (IAA) initiative and the District League Table (DLT).