A Global Overview of Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) and its Meaning in the Local Government Context of South Africa

Abstract

The article explores the global overview of M&E from the ancient governance perspective that has been ignored by the modern government in the African contest. African M&E approach is required in the local rural municipalities due to its complex and diverse set of problems. These problems are as a result of leadership dichotomy which is witnessed between Amakhosi and municipal authorities. Amakhosi have a role to hold municipal authorities accountable from a Citizen-Based Approach. The underlying philosophy of the article is not about the discourse of the modernists and traditionalists around the evolution of M&E, but is how and in what ways M&E should be designed and planned for the implementation of a successful relevant M&E approach for local rural municipalities. The article made use of secondary data, gathered from various sources. Case studies of the international countries were also sourced through desktop to ascertain their best practice on M&E. The article concludes that the lack of M&E approach for the local government in the rural municipalities requires the Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PM&E) approach to allow stakeholders, including Amakhosi to assess the performance ofthe rural municipalities. The study is significant to the local and internal public scholarship of public administration since it bring approaches in M&E policy in the field of public administration. For example, indigenous African knowledge is critical in knowledge management.

State of monitoring and evaluation in Anglophone Africa: Centre for Learning on Evaluation and Results in Anglophone Africa’s reflections

“…In many administrations, ministries of finance (or treasuries) remain primarily responsible for fiscal planning and budgeting, which they do with little or no engagement with entities responsible for the generation and utilisation of evidence. This concurs with Masuku (2015), highlighting that government departments work in silos and other entities are often not included. Government sectors take their cue from decisions about programme delivery made by national fiscal and sector planning processes, and evaluation findings rarely find their way into the budget decision-making system.…”

Strengthening Anglophone Africa M&E systems: A CLEAR-AA perspective on guiding principles, challenges and emerging lessons

“…Based on our experiences, and informal conversations with public sector officials in English-speaking countries, M&E services suffer the most when budgets need to be cut, indicative of the lack of acknowledgement of the value of M&E in improving government performance, transparency, accountability and social change. A possible risk of doing away with M&E because of budgetary constraints is that government officials may not uphold the principles of truth and transparency to the citizens of the state, as M&E is an integral element of accountable governance (Masuku 2015). A study conducted by Mthethwa and Jili (2016) in South Africa reports that a lack of effective M&E of public projects in government is a major challenge facing government officials because they are deprived of the opportunity to learn about what works and does not work.…”

What works for poor farmers? Insights from South Africa’s national policy evaluations

“…With this in mind, a number of recent articles have sought to explicitly document how this important 'policy experiment' is unfolding on the African continent (Goldman et al 2018;Mapitsa & Chirau 2019;Masuku 2015;Mofolo, Mkuyane & Skade 2014). All of these works have been written largely from the perspective of those working closely within NESs.…”