How Can Datafication Augment M&E in the African Public Sector

Datafication is changing our societies. It has already changed how public institutions operate: how they develop and implement policies and deliver public services. It has, however, not yet fundamentally affected the monitoring of these policies. The potential is enormous. The utilization of big data to monitor the performance of different policies and public institutions is one of the most exciting promises of the ‘data age’. The use of data, particularly within the public sector, is not new and has been of central concern for the M&E of government activities. Performance measurement, in particular, places a central focus on the relationship between inputs, outputs, outcomes, benchmarks, citizen satisfaction, productivity and the tools available to observe the data generated by these distinct but interdependent entities and whether they achieve the public objectives (Williams, 2003, p. 643).

There three uses of data for policy maintenance and generation: (1) that data and evidence should be used to effectively inform decisions on appropriate policy action and (2) data generated from the evaluation of policies should be used to inform decisions regarding whether to continue, halt, improve policies and (3) that evidence is used to inform the future consideration of policy options (Sanderson, 2002, p. 4).

This webinar brings together researchers and experts who have been involved in working on building knowledge on various types of monitoring and it potential use in the public sector. It is hoped this webinar will stimulate further discussions on datafication as a tool to augment M&E in the public sector by presenting questions for debate.