The Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Directorate of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and academia of the University of Peshawar (UoP) would carry forward the evaluation of development projects initiated under the Multi-Donor Trust Fund in due course of time, said a press statement issued here on Wednesday by the Post-Crisis Need Assessment – Implementation Support Unit ((PCNA-ISU) for the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
“Work has begun to evaluate the government investments for development and find answers to questions like whether development programmes are achieving people’s welfare or not? Evidence of this nature is required to ensure that scarce public monies are spent for their best use,” said PCNA-ISU Fata coordinator Mohammad Zahoor in the statement after he attended a discourse held on the subject recently.
The statement said that a one-week impact evaluation workshop was organised by ISU and MDTF jointly, which was termed successful by a team of professors from Georgia State University (GSU)-USA. GSU is providing technical assistance to the directorate and UoP.
Step aimed at ensuring best use of govt funds
The workshop discussed how in due course of time the international support would phase out and other two local stakeholders, namely the M&E Directorate and UoP, should then have the capacity to carry forward evaluation.
ISU is implementing a number of development projects of Fata and KP. FATA spends close to Rs18 billion and KP allocates Rs140 billion to development projects annually. As a result of the ISU efforts, GSU is augmenting the ongoing evaluations and spending $40,000 on trainings and travels for the local university and the directorate staff. GSU is engaged in this task for academic learning and not for profit. The WB and ISU have motivated GSU to augment the evaluations and demonstrate to the ISU, government officials and UoP the usefulness of different evaluation methods, said the statement.
The statement said that well-grounded and analytically rigorous evaluations had traditionally not been done in public sector programmes. Efficient allocation of scarce public resources to high priority areas with maximum impact is a abiding government priority. To achieve this objective, impact evaluation would be institutionalised in government systems in the Fata and KP. For achieving this, a set of 12 projects was identified in different sectors and their funding sources and policy questions of interest. These projects are in case of Fata i.e. Fata Tribunal, FATA Urban Center Project, Anti-corruption Hotline at Governors’ Inspection Team , Off-Season Vegetable Production, TB Control Program Fata. For KP the projects are: Operationalisation of Right to Information Commission, Establishment of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Right to Public Services Commission, Establishing e-Citizen Grievance Redressal System, Southern Area Development Project, Peshawar Uplift Programme, etc.
Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2014
