Effective government monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems provide governments with the appropriate evidence to enact sound policy and management, and thus are essential to development. On August 1, 2007, the Infoshop and the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) of the World Bank cohosted the book launch and discussion of the publication “How to Build Better M&E Systems to Support Better Government,” held at the Bank’s headquarters in Washington, DC. The event brought together experts to discuss the success and struggles faced by different countries in establishing well-functioning M&E government systems.
Vinod Thomas, Director-General of Evaluation, introduced the event and the speakers. Following the introduction, Keith Mackay, author of the book and Senior Evaluation Officer at the IEG, spoke about the challenges and lessons learned from building government systems for M&E in various countries. He mentioned that OECD countries and some developing countries are devoting considerable efforts to developing or strengthening their M&E systems, and are reaping clear benefits from doing so. In countries such as Colombia, Mexico, and Chile, these systems are helping governments in establishing performance-based budgeting, evidence-based policy making, and achieve greater effectiveness of government spending and increased accountability. In the case of Mexico, Mackay spoke about the highly successful Progresa evaluation, which has been inspiring other governments in the region to pursue similar M&E systems. He mentioned Colombian President Uribe’s use of the country’s performance indicator system at the monthly meetings with his ministers, measuring their progress against his presidential goals, and as such increasing accountability and efficiency. The system also creates greater incentives to reach targets.
Mackay went on to point out that in other regions, such as Africa, the challenge is not to build new systems of government M&E, but to improve on what they already have. He mentioned the case of Uganda, where previously 16 uncoordinated evaluation systems were producing an excessive volume of data, and of questionable quality. Mackay mentioned the success of Uganda’s subsequent efforts to review and rationalize the administrative data systems, conduct public expenditure tracking surveys, and track the “leakage” of funds including corruption. He stressed that among the lessons learned from his experiences with M&E is that there is no one blueprint to apply to every country; each country has a different starting point. This became an evident issue when several Latin American countries had considered copying Chile’s M&E system.
Jiayi Zou, Chairperson of the Board’s Committee on Development Effectiveness, and Executive Director at the World Bank, congratulated Keith Mackay on his book, and acknowledged M&E as an important building block of achieving good governance. She said it does so by providing the scientific complement to democratic decision-making, and helping civil society and governments make the right decisions. She stated that M&E also helps governments make well-informed choices by allowing them to assess the tradeoffs when allocating public resources. In addition, Zou stated that the book can serve as a tool to help the World Bank Group consider the best way it can help governments achieve good governance.
Jeff Gutman, Vice President and Head of Network, Operations Policy and Country Services at the World Bank, was the last speaker of the event. He suggested that the challenge with M&E had now shifted from the “why” and the “what” ― these questions have now been answered ― to the “how” He saw Keith Mackay’s book as helping to address this need by its pragmatic focus on how to build M&E systems. Among the challenges of monitoring and evaluation faced by the Bank, he mentioned the need to have a country-oriented system (which he already sees as a strong trend), and coordination among the donors. He mentioned that the Bank itself has one of the most extensive evaluation systems, and asked whether the Bank has been able to measure these results effectively and learn from past mistakes.
In the question and answer section, audience members asked about the necessity of building capacity at the early stages of M&E, and on how to reconcile the conduct of evaluation with institutional capacity building. They also asked how to reconcile the need for cross-country comparisons of performance ― as revealed by M&E ― with Mackay’s comment that no standard blueprint should be applied to all countries when building M&E systems.
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