Public Sector Governance and Accountability Series: Budgeting and ...

should be conducted largely on the basis of expertise and inputs external to
the government and, in many cases, external to the country. At the same
time, an organic link to the regular administrative apparatus must be created.
The approach to creating M&E capacity in African developing countries
should therefore rest on two complementary efforts: (a) relying on external
evaluations, especially for major expenditure programs, but (b) working to
create a small but strong in-house capacity to design, guide, contract, and
monitor the external evaluators. Such in-house capacity must not be confined
to a separate small “evaluation ghetto” but requires systematic connections
to the public finance function and to the line ministries, in whatever modality
is effective in the specific country.
One more observation: the capacity to monitor and evaluate government
action is too important to be left entirely to government, and one
should also consider possibilities for using the service users themselves to
provide feedback and contestability. Appropriate participation by civil society
can augment limited governmental capacity for M&E. The role of nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) is especially relevant here. The Uganda
experience, among others, has shown the potential contribution of NGOs to
effective M&E as well as the NGOs’ concern with the risk of being co-opted.
The issue is delicate, but a balance between cooperation and independence
can be struck.
Other lessons of experience in introducing M&E capacity in developing
countries are summarized in box 12.8.
The Role of Donors
Strengthening Public Expenditure Management in Africa 427
Issues of aid effectiveness are longstanding and too complex to be approached
here. In aid for PEM, however, a major problem and a key opportunity may
be mentioned. In general, donors themselves have sometimes caused or
aggravated expenditure management problems in the aid-recipient countries.
Most often, the sins of donors have been sins of omission—failing to
exercise due diligence when introducing complex new systems, neglecting to
consider capacity and implementation realities, and allowing the other
problems frequently mentioned in the previous sections. The most critical
role of donors in budget reforms is thus to make sure that, at a minimum,
they do not themselves contribute to destroying workable systems and
aggravate local capacity limitations through the design and implementation
of their programs. One of the worst sins of commission has been payment
of salary top-ups and bonuses for civil servants working on aid-assisted
budget “reform” projects—despite the lip service paid to the need to avoid