RE: Enhancing funding and service delivery in agriculture: any ideas? | Eval Forward

Dear Christine,

I am a private consultant based in Zambia.  I provide consultancy services for rural development - agriculture in particular.  I understand your predicament in resource allocation to monitoring and evaluation! 

What I see as the biggest impediment is the failure to recognise monitoring and evaluation as part of integral component of implementation by management or the principle and subsequent mis-understanding of the ultimate function of M&E.  M&E is often seen as a by-the way and only turned to when things are seemingly not going well.  This is an attitude problem emanating from technically being misguided by the M&E professionals given the responsibility to guide.    

In our budget presentations the targets highlighted to Parliament are hollow, such as, "Improve food security situation in 2019" for example. Even with further deliberation of the budget speeches in small parliamentary committees by parliament, the results still remain hanging.  Hence the failure to justify higher expenditure on M&E.  Monitoring and Evaluation of most public goods/services is seen as "Follow-up" to see progress and or quality.  Such follow-ups, as I have observed, are done with no supporting equipment/tools for verification.  A public worker merely makes a visual inspection and reports back or makes a comment about it and it ends there.

I strongly feel that M&E receives little resources because its functions are not well articulated by those entrusted to do so.  Although our government has placed overall mandate on the Ministry of Planning & National Development to manage and coordinate Government's Monitoring, Evaluation and Research, the linkages with other ministries in this area is weak or not very clear.  The mandate is defined as "...tracking of delivery of public services and assessment of impact and appropriateness of policies and development programmes and projects...".  I feel this is incorrect and limits the functions of the M&E to tracking, assessments; it does not link evaluation to improving performance, accountability and learning.  This is the missing link and as such M&E always gets peanuts from the budget because its role is misunderstood.

 

Kelvin