23-March-2023
1. What is your role at Twende Mbele?
As the Programme Manager, my responsibilities are to maintain the Twende Mbele mandate of building the performance monitoring and evaluation systems of our 6 African governments (Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Niger, South Africa, and Uganda), taking a peer-learning approach. With this mandate in mind, one of my responsibilities is to engage in strategic management of relations with all the core governments of the programmes and the two regional evaluation capacity development (ECD) partners, CLEAR-AA and IDEV. Cultivating and managing relations with development partners (donors), prospective member countries, and other ECD institutes is another important component of the strategic management duties of the Programme Manager. As a result, stakeholder relations and management (including diplomacy) are a major part of my job. Then there is the project management aspect, where we co-commission, oversee (monitoring), and quality-assure capacity development projects across our member nations. Twende Mbele also has a responsibility to engage in peer-learning activities and to share country experiences in building and maintaining M&E systems that contribute to effective governance and better development results. Thus, learning and communications are a major part of my job, ably assisted by our diligent and agile Learning and Communications Coordinator, Mr Parfait Kasongo.
2. As the administrator of Twende Mbele, what would you say are the benefits of being a Twende Mbele Member?
I think the availability of a collective group of fellow member states who are equally dedicated to building individual and institutional M&E capacities, and building an intrastate culture of evidence based governance (policymaking and implementation) is a great space to be in. Twende Mbele is designed to be a network that resolves common governance challenges through mutual learning. The added benefit of being a Twende Mbele member state is that you are an equal partner with equal say in determining the work plan of the programme, and then benefitting from the implementation of various funded capacity-building and peer-learning activities that emanate from that work plan. So the programme is both a deliberative as well as an action-oriented initiative. Through Twende Mbele, member countries also gain access to the public sector M&E systems of other countries from which they can learn and adapt certain practices.
3. What is your biggest success/memory (individual or institutional) of collaboration with IDEV ?
Since joining in July 2022, Twende Mbele and IDEV have collaborated on three peer-learning webinars wherein IDEV has given practice-based presentations on how they go about engaging in stakeholder analysis and engagement in evaluations, and the importance of tailoring evaluation dissemination plans according to the bespoke needs of each program evaluation stakeholder. These have been important learning opportunities for our member governments and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), who have provided positive feedback on the learning value of these learning sessions. This contributes to the communications capacities of our evaluation practitioners, aiding them in thinking about ways to bridge the gap in the evaluation economy between producers of evaluation evidence and prospective users. For some reason, deliberate and effective stakeholder engagement communication is often an underrated element of evaluation and the evidence-based policymaking fields.
4. In your opinion, what are the pitfalls in engaging with and strengthening government M&E system and accountability to citizens?
Strengthening M&E systems is a noble cause, however, the observable pitfall of the ECD field has been the relative marginalisation of certain state and non-state institutions in the endeavour. For instance, all of our member governments in Twende Mbele are unitary states, but they have subnational government that is at the coalface of service delivery. M&E systems development thinking and discourse in this third decade of the 21st century need to be cognisant that an effective and sustainable M&E system requires subnational government institutions, universities, and communities to also be active agents in M&E systems. This means that community-based M&E forums where communities and government grapple with service delivery challenges and programme performance need to be illuminated and promoted. Governments are an entity created by ordinary citizens, and they should be as much a focus of ECD as public sector institutions. Incrementally, we will get there.
5. What challenges does Twende Mbele face in strengthening the national government M&E system?
Striking a balance on priorities is a challenge that requires diplomacy. To come up with a work plan that balances the individual needs of these countries’ M&E systems while also creating avenues for common projects that will be a stepping stone for peer-learning is a tough balancing act. Peer-learning needs to be based on M&E systems needs of all these member nations who have unique M&E systems that are at various stages. This requires nuance in issue prioritisation when it comes to the work plan. As human beings, building consensus is not easy because we have divergent interests, and so every collective work plan of an intergovernmental partnership will always be a compromise. A compromise does not mean that we all get what we want, but it means that there is an adequate representation of each country’s priorities in terms of their M&E systems development needs.
6. Looking forward, how do you think Twende Mbele can strengthen its core objectives in the future?
Twende Mbele is a multilateral partnership that exists within a specific time and place in African and world history. The most pressing phenomenon our governments need to respond to is the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) which will again determine which countries develop and which countries will remain on the margins of the global economy, as did the first three industrial revolutions. Our M&E systems development and peer-learning initiatives as a programme need to be responsive and relevant to the pressing developmental needs of the day. The 4IR is a global phenomenon to which every entity needs to respond to, not just us as Twende Mbele. Thus, part of our capacity development work needs to contribute to the ability of our governments to navigate the socio-economic and political opportunities and threats that come with this 4IR phenomenon. As a result, Twende Mbele work plans in the medium-term need to ensure that we strike a balance between national, sectoral, and subnational systems development interventions and peer-learning. The sectors (agriculture, industry, services, communications, etc.) in Africa need to take advantage of this proliferated digital moment of the 4IR, and our government M&E systems in these sectors need not be left behind. For instance, part of our M&E systems development discourse and practice needs to ask how, for example, we help our governments to develop indicators of digitalisation across sectors to maintain a comparative and competitive advantage in the global economy. The transformation of the ECD discourse and practice is not just a Twende Mbele challenge, but a challenge to the ECD and evaluation communities as a whole.