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| Saturday, 27 March 2004 |
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In keeping with modern standards of good governance, Sri Lanka too has decided to embark on building a transparent and accountable system to evaluate its performance in the future, states a Sri Lanka-German Development Cooperation press release. The release said that more than 50 senior level officials from the government and its line-agencies and members of civil society this week participated in a four day workshop in Colombo on how to build a performance-based evaluation system. The workshop titled "Designing and building a result-based monitoring and evaluation system," will train Sri Lankans on how to build an evaluation system that goes beyond the traditional methods of evaluation and seek to pressure governments to be more transparent and accountable than ever before. "The pressure to demonstrate results is now global. Governments around the world are increasingly becoming more accountable to their citizens," said Workshop Director Dr. Ray Rist, a Senior Evaluation Specialist of the World Bank. A former university professor and a veteran who served with the United States Congress to evaluate the performance of the US government, Dr. Rist champions the cause of evaluating governments based on their true performance. "Traditional methods of evaluation document how busy governments have been but not how effective they have been. The modern method goes beyond to document how successful and how effective governments have been," said Dr. Rist. He gives an example in a typical government funded training program for electricians. When the program is evaluated by the traditional method it would track budgets, inputs, outputs, trainees, trainers and finally how many people graduated from the program. In a modern performance-based evaluation method, one would look at all of the above and then strive to get answers to the following questions: What are the consequences of the programme? Did the trainees get jobs upon graduation? How many of them remain in their field of education? Were the employers who hired the graduates satisfied with their knowledge and abilities? 'Answers to these questions will provide us with insight not on what we have done, but on how successful we have been with what we have done," Dr. Rist explained. "Our trainees would go back to their various units of government and start designing and building a modern performance-based monitoring and evaluation system, which would someday become the standard in evaluating government performance," he adds. According to Dr. Rist, the commitment of the Government of Sri Lanka to track its own performance is evident through this exercise. A government that does not care about its performance is not going to take the trouble to put such an evaluation system in place. So I believe that Sri Lanka is sending a strong message that it is prepared to be evaluated on its performance and effectiveness," Dr. Rist said. The workshop was organised by the Sri Lanka Evaluation Association (SLEvA) and the Ministry of Policy Development and Implementation and was supported by UNICEF and the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) with funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. A non-profit organisation SLEvA was founded in 1999 by a group of Sri Lankan professionals who were committed towards the development of an evaluation culture that was transparent, accountable and performance-based. Dr. Indra Thudawe is SLEvA's current president. |
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