‘Routinely evaluate policy effectiveness’
GOVERNMENT must continually evaluate its policies to assess their effectiveness and ensure the realisation of an upper middle-income economy by 2030.
This was said by Speaker of the National Assembly Advocate Jacob Mudenda while addressing a sensitisation workshop for chairpersons of committees and selected committee members on African Parliamentarians’ Network on Development Evaluation in Harare yesterday. Adv Mudenda called on authorities to embrace the development evaluation matrix in order to establish the impact of policies such as the National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1).
“Development is the transformative process of the state of being materially and/or immaterially vis-à-vis the attendant attainment of human socio-economic bettered livelihoods of the citizenry,”he said.
“Concomitantly, evaluation connotes an assessment of how the bettered livelihoods of the citizenry have been achieved in terms of attaining greater heights of wellbeing as espoused in the implementation of national budgets.”
Parliament, he said, must assiduously continue its watchdog role to ensure the implementation of citizen-centred policies.
Development evaluation, added Adv Mudenda, is a globally accepted tool for enhancing the“tripartite roles of parliamentarians, which are robust oversight, legislative process and representation”.
He said evidence-based development evaluation in decision-making was imperative and helps inform policy formulation.
“It is axiomatic that the drive towards development evaluation transcends the test of time,”said Adv Mudenda.
“Evaluations have been conducted for more than 100 years in the United States and Europe. An important idea developed about public administration in the United States during the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries was that it was possible to scientifically judge the efficiency of different development interventions in relation to their intended objectives.”
He said after World War there was heightened interest in using social sciences in formulating public interventions.
“To date, various pieces of legislation have been enacted to support the evaluation architecture, which includes the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment No. 20 of 2013, the National Monitoring and Evaluation Policy, amendments to the Public Finance Management Act, the Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Act, Public Entities Corporate Governance Act and the Audit Office Act, among other various pieces of legislation and policy.”