The Economic Policy Research Centre has played a key role in the Uganda government monitoring and evaluation function.
Presenting to the M&E stocktaking virtual workshop organized by the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) on June 30, 2021, Dr Madina Guloba, the EPRC’s Senior Research Fellow, showed how EPRC has helped the government in the process evaluation of much of its programmes run by different ministries, departments and agencies.
She indicated that the centre has helped the OPM in the assessment of programmes around livelihood interventions. “This was a process evaluation,” she said. “Government had over 325 intervention programmes that were going on. EPRC did an evaluation to give insights on what really is going on with interesting results found.”
Dr Madina Guloba
The EPRC has also had technical input to provide support to the Northern Uganda Social Action Fund (NUSAF) III. There’re several programmes being implemented through NUSAF, including the issues around the sustainable livelihoods covering watersheds, the DRF (Disaster Risk Financing) for the refugees, and Labour-Intensive Public Works programmes.
“As an institution, it has been a big achievement to provide technical input into the success, programming and implementation of the NUSAF III,” Guloba said. “Another achievement comes through a project called the INCLUDE project on creating productive and decent work for youth and women where collaboration through M&E platform’s various methodologies, we were able to hold barazas (in different communities).”
The barazas offer accountability around the government programmes, the money spent and are key to hearing citizens voices.
“There was the aspect of stakeholder mapping [in barazas] to understand the environment in terms of who is influential, and influencing what action. The other bit we had was us partnering with Sedi (a UK funded programme on Strengthening evidence for development for impact).
“It has been a bit interesting [because] you need to map and understand who are your influencers. The works here have been an eye-opener in terms of who do we influence; who should you partner with to work, where should our work go for action,” she said.
“Sedi is an important pathway to see how best you can influence with your evidence at a higher level in terms of the uptake. This has been a very good experience.”
There have been lessons for the EPRC. They include the fact that engagement processes differ and engagement matters.
The other aspect is that M&E must go beyond just evaluating the process and look out for the critical actions that are being done.
“We need to invest in the ‘so what’ as an M&E fraternity. So what after generating this evidence?”
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