Archive

CSOs come with varying human and financial capabilities, and serve on issues ranging from basic social services to the protection of human and environmental rights. As such, CSOs represent a wealth of knowledge and potential influence, and have much to offer in the process of national development.

Within a countries evaluation ecosystem, CSOs play a significant role as a source of evidence generation. They employ monitoring and evaluation (M&E) professionals; commission evaluations in different countries, and in many cases, they have the more advanced M&E systems, generating significant amounts of data and evaluation evidence.

A great deal has been written about the importance of achieving prioritisation in public sector planning, and even more has been written about how this could be done, but most of the latter work focuses on the theory of how this is to be achieved (the assumed characteristics of a successful prioritisation system, the suggested components of a performance management system, etc.). There is little systematic work that considers critically what works, what doesn’t work and why, and how these conclusions might be relevant in the South African context.

With respect to the issue of “alignment”, there is less critical research to be found, nor is there universal agreement on exactly what “alignment” means in the complex environment of the public sector. The term is often used without having a clear definition attached to it. However, two useful conceptualisations of the terms suggest that alignment may be used to assess what is happening within one particular organisation as well as how this dynamic is manifested across the public sector.it is helpful to conceive of alignment as a process, something that needs to be actively and continuously managed, rather than a static structure or regulation. The aim of this research is to undertake a literature review focusing on two areas:

• Approaches, processes and tools that could support more effective plan prioritisation and budget alignment; and
• The utilization of monitoring and evaluation systems and information to support better prioritisation and alignment.

Five years into implementing the NES, DPME started an evaluation of the entire system. The purpose of the evaluation was to assess whether implementation of the NES since 2011/12 is having an impact on the programmes and policies evaluated, the departments involved and other key stakeholders; and to determine how the system needs to be strengthened.

This practice brief highlights the capacity development efforts by stakeholders in the parliamentary space through Twende Mbele and the Centre for Learning on Evaluation and Results (CLEAR-AA) peer learning programme. It looks at some of the challenges facing parliamentarians – both generators and users of evidence, and the benefits of taking part in the peer learning programme where the with the help of capacity development partners as facilitators, meet and share best practices.

Over the past few years, there has been an increase in the number of developing countries that either have, or are in the process of developing, a national evaluation policy and/or system (NEPS), (Bamberger et 2014). While acknowledging that there is growing interest and increase in the number of governments adopting the concept of evaluation and creating national evaluation policies (NEPS) and national evaluation systems (NES), in most cases these NEPs and NES are not gender responsive nor do they focus on social equity. Marco Segone et al, note that ‘this suggests that for many countries gender equality is not a priority or is not considered relevant to national development policies and programmes addressed by the NEPs’. However, the moral imperative of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development of ‘no one left behind’ which intones social and gender equity is binding on all countries that have signed this latest global development compact containing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. One of these -Goal #5 is entirely dedicated to transforming our world by making gender equality the norm by 2030.