By Kodjo Adams, GNA
Accra, Oct. 23, GNA – Dr Charles Amoateng, the Head of Centre for Learning on Evaluation and Results, West Africa, has said the Centre is developing an academic curriculum for monitoring and evaluation in universities in Africa.
Dr Amoateng said the Centre was working with stakeholders in Africa universities to standardise monitoring and evaluation of curriculum for the graduate and post graduate level.
He said this in Accra at the opening of a five-day training programme to build the capacity of 70 directors of policy planning, monitoring and evaluation unit of all the Ministries in the country.
The programme was organised by the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) in collaboration with the Ministry of Monitoring and Evaluation.
He said the development of the curriculum is important because different universities all over Africa are doing monitoring and evaluation, but the content has not been standardised.
Dr Amoateng said there is the need to professionalise the curriculum, saying « we want to get to a point that student who come to GIMPA can spend one year in studying monitoring and evaluation and continue the rest of the year in Ivory Coast or Tanzania because of the same curriculum ».
« We have about 50 professors all over Africa to brainstorm on what exactly should go into an African wide monitoring and evaluation curriculum, especially at the masters’ level ».
He said the Professors, who in 2017 started work on the documents, will use the week to discuss the draft report and fine-tune it before it to be sent to the various countries for validation to become a standard curriculum for the universities who have agreed to the standardisation process.
He said since 2017, the Centre has been working with the Ministry of Monitoring and Evaluation to build capacity of practitioners in the public sector.
Dr Amoateng said the practitioners would be trained to understand basic concepts around how to monitor and evaluate government flagship programmes and policies.
« We are working with the Ministries to develop a policy that will be used for monitoring and evaluation within the public sector « he said.
He said the training would help all the Ministries to improve on their results framework so that Ministers and leadership within the public sector would know how to use evidence-based results in decision making.
« We have realised that quite often, policy decisions are made by impulse but we wants government to be able to reflect on what is working and not working and take decisions on which programmes to scale up, change and decide on ways to improve on lives of the people. »
He said sound and monitoring evaluation in the public sector system is needed for sustained development.
Professor Philip Duku Osei, the Deputy Rector of GIMPA, said monitoring and evaluation are crucial activities for effective management.
He said good programmes are those that tend to have a great deal of impact on the lives of the people adding that public sector actors must ensure that they have the people in mind in all their programmes.
He said the public services needed a strong and coherent monitoring and evaluation framework that would promote learning and performance measurement.
Professor Osei urged the participants to impart the knowledge acquired in their field of work to ensure service delivery in the public sector because good monitoring and evaluation system was the basis for successful planning and budgeting.
