Government Reviews Evaluation Tools

All things being equal, actors in the conception and evaluation of development projects in the country will hence adopt a systematic approach in what they do so that projects executed in the country directly impact the lives of citizens. The Ministry of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development this weekend held a two-day capacity building workshop for actors in the projects' control chain to ensure that projects, especially those financed with the public investment budget, are not just executed for the sake of using credits.

The workshop which ran from March 1 to 2, the Secretary General at MINEPAT, Gilbert Didier Edoa said, was to build the capacities of Inspectors General, Directors of General Affairs, Directors of Studies of the various ministries and other stakeholders on analysing development projects so that set objectives are attained at term. This is to halt hitherto malpractices in the public investments sector like the abandonment or poor execution of projects by contractors, on one hand, and the poor programming of projects and worse till corruption in the sector which manifests through siphoning projects, awarding them to unqualified contractors against a ransom or accepting poorly or non-executed projects, on another. "We need to improve the quality of our public investment projects and programmes. And for this to be done, we need to be up-to-date with results-based evaluation tools. A public investment project has an objective. We need to know the socio-economic impact of the project on the economy as well as its arbitration parameters so as to choose one project and not the other. This is to engender efficiency in our public investment projects so that they ably meet the needs of the population for which they are conceived. Over the years, the State has considerably invested on the economy but the results remain timid vis-à-vis expectations. Sometimes the projects' costs and durations are beyond plan. Time has come for various projects and programmes to be systematically evaluated, the SG said.

Participants had lectures on "results-based management," "Key concepts of the programme budget," "Functional and theoretical economic evaluation within the framework of results-based management," "Stages of economic evaluation of projects and programmes," and "Examples of economic evaluation of some government projects."