Since 2015, GIZ’s Good Financial Governance Program (GFG) was implementing a large-scale program aiming to create a government-wide M&E system, including core business activities, IT support and capacity building and training. For this program, GIZ acts as implementing agency for UKAid and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The program supported the Ministry of National Development Planning (MNDP), the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Finance (MoF) at the “Apex” level as well as five sectors (Agriculture, Labour, Education, Health and Transport), encompassing seven line ministries.
The services requested under this assignment supported the first and the third pillar GFG’s M&E component, namely Capacity Building and Training on core business M&E activities.
The assignment was embedded in the Zambian Government’s process to produce its Annual Progress Report (APR). In order to improve evidence-based policy making in the context of the APR an in-depth understanding of the national context and how different results in various sectors interact with regards to the achievement of overall development objectives was required.
The APR is used as a monitoring tool and was intended to increase transparency of development outcomes. The ToR stated that the key issue underlying the assignment were the untimely production of the APR due to insufficient capacities of M&E staff to analyse, interpret and communicates meaningfully on the results and findings extracted from the available and assembled data sets from various sectors and line ministries.
Our understanding of the ToR and the status of achievements of the Programme was that the challenge existed in the further use of collected data through M&E activities under the GW-MIS in order to analyse and extract relevant information on actual performance against the N-KPIs. The appropriate, efficient and transparent communication and visualisation of this information gained from data analysis was another crucial element of this assignment.
Subsequently, the objective as described in the ToR was to strengthen the skills of M&E staff in data analysis and communication and to support the APR production process.
Ultimately, this project contributed to better policy decisions for improved service delivery for citizens and higher transparency and accountability