Promoting use of Evaluations by Government

Moderator

• Adeline Sibanda, former President African Evaluation Association

Panellists

• Nox Chitepo, Director, Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, South Africa
• Claudius Emmanuel, Permanent Secretary, Department of Economic Development, St. Lucia
• Francisca Moreno, Head of the Social Policies Division, Ministry of Social Development and Family, Chile
• Tashi Duba, Senior Research Officer, Gross National Happiness Commission Secretariat, Royal Government of Bhutan

How are countries using evidence from evaluation to inform decision‑making, policy and strategy development? This panel shared examples from a number of countries where evidence has led to policy and strategy changes and discussed the factors promoting the use of evidence from evaluations in planning, programming and policymaking processes.

• Evaluation use can begin during the evaluation. In the case of South Africa, an evaluation of the detective service was requested by the South African Police Service. During the data collection phase, it came out that cold cases had been improperly investigated. As a result, the cases were reopened, which led to a rebuilding of trust between the community and police.
• Who decides to do an evaluation influences its use. In South Africa, it is the service in question that requests an evaluation, which means that the process is already owned from the outset. In addition, the evaluation may be co-funded by the requesting service, which creates motivation to use the findings to make improvements to the programme in question. Furthermore, the programme owners, not the independent evaluators, chaired the evaluation steering committee, which included other stakeholders such as the prosecuting authority, which meant there was interest in a full and fair evaluation.
• Different types of evaluations serve different uses in the policy cycle. In Chile, the main objective of the monitoring and evaluation system is to contribute to improving the quality of public programmes. Ex-ante evaluations support the design of programmes, monitoring during implementation helps to make course corrections, and ex-post evaluation helps future designs and decisions. Similar systems are in place in Bhutan, where ex-ante evaluations are underway to help design a national policy for persons living with disabilities, and an evaluation of the industrial development scheme is leading to adaptations. A unique tool in Bhutan is the Gross National Happiness screening tool.
• Flexibility promotes use. In St. Lucia, the monitoring and tracking tools and flexible results framework used in a Disaster Vulnerability Risk Reduction Project allowed for the operationalization of a “contingent emergency response component” when a national emergency was called due to COVID-19. This allowed for an additional release of funds and extension of the project, and the flexible framework continued to monitor progress towards the overall objective of benefiting people on the ground.

Conclusion

It is important to put systems in place to ensure that evaluations are actually happening, but also to work on building capacity, passion and excitement around evaluation to strengthen its use. The COVID-19 crisis has shown us that evaluation systems, structures and approaches need to be flexible, and be able to respond promptly to the immediate needs of policymakers.