Monitoring & Evaluation within the Government with special reference to cases from the Government of India

Evidence driven governance requires an ecosystem, architecture and culture which promotes and supports it. Strong M&E can help generate high quality data for evidence-based decision making. From keeping up with the technological advancements and changes, the ecosystem needs to build human resource, infrastructure and technological capabilities to remain compatible. Enablers like data policies, strategies and synergic partnerships would be pertinent to enable a data-centric development. The panel will focus on the home-grown model which is India-specific. The panel will also deep dive and draw upon some specific success stories across the globe on adopting a data-based governance model. The session would also delve on ways a country can develop their road map to a data-based governance economy.

Capacity Building is an integrated activity for Monitoring & Evaluation of large-scale development programs. Undertaking this activity amid the diverse needs of the public sector in terms of domains, operating levels and functions, needs a balance of standardization as well as frugal innovation. Using a framework of M&E competencies (behavioral, technical and functional) as a baseline, this panel explores the roadmap to develop these competencies over time and at the same time highlight the organizational enablers and envision the pedagogical innovations to achieve capacity as an outcome. Through collaborative conversations across panelists and participants, this panel attempts to clear the pathway to uplift the baseline of M&E competencies that it begins with. The session will also delve into DMEO’s efforts for building M&E capacities both in government and wider M&E ecosystem drawing upon competency models and collaboration with administrative training institutions, academia, research organizations and think tanks.

An effective and efficient government is one which is successful in achieving the sustainable socio- economic development goals. A number of governments are working to improve their performances by creating a system which would help in measuring the State performances and eventually the performance of the country as a whole. Monitoring and evaluation are one such framework that is used by governments to evaluate themselves on their achieved results. It's very crucial to understand that the system itself has evolved from the traditional implementation approaches to the result-based M&E approach for good governance, transparency and for achieving the tangible results through output outcome-based approach. Through collaborative conversations across panelists and participants, we will understand how M&E systems have evolved in due time and the need for institutionalizing result-based M&E systems in the country for achieving the desired results. The session would mainly give insights on the experiences gathered by different States of India while moving on to the result-based Monitoring and Evaluation approach.

Large scale evaluations require not only ample resources, time and funds, but also quality baseline data. However, the sector is devoid of adequate baseline data which hampers the pre-evaluation understanding of large-scale evaluations. The session would discuss the approaches adopted by leading evaluation organisations to undertake large scale evaluations. Specifically, after COVID-19 pandemic which has posed an additional layer of challenge to collecting data, the panel will share ways in which they have changed the implementation of the evaluations. The session will explore mitigation techniques of risks which are envisaged with a large scale evaluation specifically in an ecosystem which lacks data.