Monitoring and Evaluation Capacity Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons from Governance Programming

Finds that governance failures in SSA are often attributable in whole or in part to:

• governments’ unwillingness to make themselves accountable to the citizens they are supposed to serve
• the inability of citizens and of the organizations and institutions that are assumed to represent their interests (e.g. legislatures, the judiciary, the news media, NGOs) to impose accountability on governments.

Suggests that:

• Financial and technical resources are usually not the binding constraint to solving either governance or M&E problems.
• Local leadership matters.
• Need to work with actors outside the public administration to achieve changes within it
• Allow for interventions to be designed and implemented in a way that promotes local capacity development
• Exploit opportunities for coordination between various types of governance capacity-building interventions
• Tailor the intervention to the real nature of the problem “on the ground”
• Attend to the capacity-building requirements of decentralization

Report prepared for Partnerships and Knowledge Programs Division, Operations Evaluation Department, World Bank