Leadership: The Means to Ensure Efficiency and Effectiveness in Monitoring and Evaluation in the Public Sector in South Africa

The purpose of any Public Service is to deliver effective services to citizens in order to improve their quality of life. Unfortunately this is not the case in South Africa as the performance of the public service to deliver quality services is often questioned against alleged financial irregularities, maladministration and corruption and mismanagement.

To address the situation some form of performance measurement is thus inevitable. Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) can play an important role in this regard but with a need for active citizenry where two-way information gathering and sharing between citizens and government takes place. M&E practices could enable citizens to communicate their grievances and seek redress at the point of delivery and thus provide on-going insights into service delivery. Although the benefits of using M&E include improvements in transparency, accountability, learning, feedback and productivity, should cognisance be taken of the danger of ignoring professional judgement and not seeking a nuanced understanding of the underlying reasons for good or poor performance. Unintended consequences can be the manipulation of results, ignoring non-targeted areas, alienation of professional staff, increase in bureaucracy and blocking innovation and learning. It was, however, found that evaluation in government is still only applied sporadically and is not adequately informing planning, policy-making and budgeting.

It is therefore important that on an institutional level M&E capacity development should involve providing technical support in the form of guidelines, advice, tools and frameworks related to improving M&E processes, structures, resources and infrastructure. This requires strong, ethical leadership and does citizen-based monitoring and participatory M&E approaches proved practical opportunities to build this leadership culture in society. Ethical leadership is also responsible to ensure that M&E findings result in consequences where there is poor performance and no serious attempt at improvement.