Strengthening Capacity for Monitoring and Evaluation in Uganda: Result Based Management Perspective

This report has been prepared as part of an ongoing effort by the Government of Uganda to strengthen the contribution of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) in the process of enhancing effectiveness of national budget execution and public service delivery. In conjunction with this effort, and with the support of the World Bank's Operations Evaluation Department (OED), a series of workshops and individual consultations have been held with key Government and non-government managers in Uganda. Particularly important inputs to the current report were provided by participants at a workshop of senior officials that was held in Kampala in October 2000. Uganda has implemented an impressive set of economic and budgetary management reforms. The immediate challenge for national development management, as a whole, is to translate success in the macro-economic arena into greater success in poverty reduction. Value for money in expenditures, quality of budget execution -or effectiveness of public service delivery, are serious concerns. From an M&E perspective the major problem is that both information management and decision making is focused on the administrative process of expenditures and activities rather than on the poverty outcomes, impacts and goals that are being pursued. Planning, budgeting and incentives are geared towards tracking inputs, activities and, recently, immediate outputs. Recurrent and development expenditures are reviewed separately, rather than for their combined impact in achieving overall goals. Monitoring and evaluation remain overly centred on compliance with government requirements and regulations rather than end-results of policy, program and project efforts. Civil servants get rewarded for doing paperwork well rather than making a difference in people's lives. Monitoring and evaluation in Uganda are fragmented. with multiple government and donor planning and progress reporting formats. Policy formulation, work planning and budgeting are undertaken as separate exercises at the sector and district levels. With a proliferation of different funding arrangements, officials are burdened with a large volume of reporting but have little systematic information about effectiveness of actual public service delivery. GOU has recognized the importance of improving results orientation and has defined the effectiveness of public service delivery as its highest priority. Ongoing initiatives to introduce "output oriented budgeting", "results oriented management" and pay reform deal with improving the quality of government. However, these initiatives have often been approached from the perspective of narrow departmental responsibilities rather than comprehensive goals and government-wide ownership. There is a need for much closer alignment and coordination, particularly in respect of reform of the MTEF budget format, public service conditions and decentralization efforts. A summary of the strategic M&E issues and challenges facing Uganda, and possible actions to address them, is presented in the table on page x. With the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP), Uganda has set a course of policy action to address the national development objective of reducing absolute poverty to 10% by 2017. A three-year rolling budget framework, incorporating sectoral and district planning, represents the bridge between poverty-reduction goals and operational activities. The role of M&E is to help keep track of, and continuously learn from, progress towards the PEAP/PRSP goals and targets. The starting point for M&E's contribution is clarity about what poverty eradication success looks like. In this respect, there is a need for agreeing on a clear, coherent and meaningful set of PEAP goals and targets for a more operational medium term time frame. If the goals and targets of the PEAP were to systematically cascade through the national development management system, this would help to ensure that all managers are pulling in the same direction.