Pretoria - Government is designing a citizen-based monitoring system that will help boost partnerships with civil society to better deal with issues that affect people on a daily basis.
This announcement was made by Minister in the Presidency for Performance Monitoring and Evaluation, Collins Chabane, at the AGM of the Association of Southern African Schools and Departments of Public Administration and Management in Durban on Wednesday.
"We are now designing a citizen-based monitoring system that would help in ensuring partnership with civil society in dealing with the issues that affect our people on a daily basis... we host the Presidential Hotline, which is a citizen complaints monitoring and management system.
"Since its establishment in 2009, the Presidential Hotline has served as an important source of information for government-wide performance monitoring and evaluation, and for monitoring the impact of government on citizens as it enables government to track what are the important issues for citizens and respond accordingly," he said.
Chabane said his department had been engaging the Schools of Public Administration and Management about the need to develop capacity via mainstreaming monitoring and evaluation in the university curriculum so that they can produce more skilled people who will improve on these initiatives.
However, Chabane raised concern that there was inadequate translation of the delivery agreements into strategic and operational plans at a departmental level.
He said some of the delivery agreements tended to be too long with too many indicators, which has resulted in them not being strategic enough, leading to difficulty in ensuring stakeholder coordination as well as assessing progress and challenges experienced in a much more focused manner.
While the main thrust of the outcomes-based approach was about focusing on results, the minister said there was a considerable focus on activities in the public service without due regard to the results of those activities.
Chabane said there were also challenges with the underlying departmental information systems that are supposed to enable the production of quality analytical reports which enhance evidence-based decision-making by the Executive.
"Departments sometimes produce overly positive reports that are sometimes at odds with the reality on the ground against public experiences of government services.
"We are experiencing that departments are not necessarily using the results of monitoring of the implementation of the delivery agreements to inform improvements to their programmes," he said.-SAnews.gov.za
