About
The need for more accountability, responsiveness and efficient Governance and transparent use of resources has resulted in more emphasis on Monitoring and Evaluations, so to intelligently use the scarce public resources. Monitoring and Evaluation is a tool to measure, track and assess to determine whether the policies and programmes launched are providing required results for which resources are invested. It provides useful data and information to make correct decisions for continuation or discontinuation of policy and projects in future. It also empowers the decision makers to amend, reduce or increase the resource availability for future plan of actions.
Monitoring and evaluation tend to assess whether the resources are being used in transparent way as per Government Rules and Regulations and expose the elements for misuse, embezzlement, corruption and identify the good and bad practices in implementation of the policies and projects. The major advantages of monitoring and evaluation are:--
a. Provide over view of progress of development activities in the districts and provinces, so to track the performance of on going activities.b. Track the public expenditure to ensure transparent and effective use of scare resources.c. Identify misuse, corruption, embezzlement, delay, uneconomical use of the resources.d. Create awareness and encourage the participation and involvement of civil society, including NGOs, CBOs and Non Governmental organizations. So to create sense of ownership at community level.e. Measure the implementation practices and identify the correct practice and measure up impact assessment.
f. Identify the efforts taken by departments to ensure best value for the money invested.g. The quality of public service being offered to community
The main barriers to monitoring and evaluation in the province is the lack of culture of accountability and issues of ethics and corruption. The poor quality financial and other performance information system.
Sustained Government commitments is a pre-requisite for the successful performance of the monitoring and evaluation activity. The Departments / Districts and decision makers play an important role in supporting and encouraging the role of monitoring and evaluation to ensure transparent use of resources.
It is important that a culture must be put in place at the whole of Government level from Local level to Provincial level to seek assistance and support from the activity of monitoring and evaluation. So to track the management policies and expenditures to ensure purposeful and transparent use of resources and out comes of the investments.
With the spread of result based management the need for improved monitoring and evaluation capacity is growing. With involvement of community and civil society the issue of good governance has taken a center stage and problems like poverty reduction, better delivery particularly in Social Sectors i.e. Education, Health, Drinking, Water Supply and Irrigation could only be improved by effective and transparent use of scarce resources.