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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.

The policy- and decision-making environment is inherently political – both party political in terms of achieving an electoral mandate, and in terms of organisation politics and the political economy of the country. This leads to webs of power and influence, through which stakeholders must learn to navigate. In this context, evaluation evidence is one influence on outcomes. It requires translating complex evaluation findings into usable information and recommendations, building a portfolio of evidence, a coalition of stakeholders to support it, and ensuring its use requires planning and influencing strategies.

This article investigates the status quo of evaluation education in selected tertiary institutions in Anglophone African countries. Findings indicate that evaluation education in Anglophone African tertiary institutions is mostly in the nascent stages and there are mixed feelings on the appropriate entry levels (undergraduate or postgraduate). The study highlights the need for developing a specialized evaluation curriculum as well as the potential for collaboration among various stakeholders in strengthening the design and implementation of evaluation education.