Archive

This diagnostic study on the supply and demand of evaluators in South Africa revealed that on the supply side, the size of the potential supply market will vary depending on how an ‘evaluation consultant’ is defined. The diagnostic was able to produce quantitative estimates of current and projected government demand and some qualitative assessment of non-government demand. It was also able to identify qualitative issues and insights into the research questions related to capacity and skills, representivity, accessibility, pricing and costs.

In April of 2018, Twende Mbele and the Office of the Prime Minister commissioned a diagnostic study on the supply and demand of evaluators in Uganda. On the supply side, the study established that there is a substantial potential pool of M&E consultants in Uganda. The study also established that there are a number of organisations and networks for evaluation capacity building in Uganda. On the demand side, the Government has in place guidelines for the public sector and the Ugandan Evaluation Association has developed and approved standard guidelines that stipulate that evaluators and evaluation teams must be independent, trustworthy and transparently selected.

This article documents the experience of these three countries and summarises the progress made in deepening and widening their national evaluation systems and some of the cross-cutting lessons emerging at an early stage of the Twende Mbele partnership.

Enhancing public sector performance is on the agenda of most governments. In South Africa, there is a dearth on studies that systematically assess the implementation of public sector performance improvement tools. This article is based on the study that explores the implementation of the Management Performance Assessment Tool (MPAT) within the South African public sector for the period 2011-2016. The critical implementation components are outlined and lessons from the implementation process are drawn to inform future practice.

The General Directorate of Evaluation (DGE) has conducted fourteen public policy evaluations since 2010. These evaluations made it possible to make diagnoses of the various policies, to identify their achievements and weaknesses and to formulate recommendations with a view to their improvement.

The evaluation of a public policy is only useful when the results which result from it contribute to the improvement of decision-making. The use of evaluation consists of the exploitation of results for the formulation and implementation of reforms or actions to improve public services. In order to analyze the processes and dynamics of using the results and recommendations of nine public policy evaluations carried out between 2010 and 2013, the DGE undertook in 2015 an activity to monitor the use of the results of these evaluations. The general objective of monitoring is to inquire about the arrangements made by the sectoral ministries for the implementation of the recommendations from the assessments in order to ensure the efficiency of the public service.

This report, which reports on this activity, is structured in four parts. The first part presents the methodological approach followed for carrying out the activity; the second part presents an overall summary of the level of use of evaluation results for all sectoral ministries, while the third part gives details by policy evaluated; as for the fourth part, it capitalizes on the lessons learned and offers recommendations to the Government.