Vincent Kanyamuna^1,, Million Phiri², Haggai Kanenga³, Munalula Mulonda¹

Actors outside of government have a crucial role to play in building, strengthening and sustaining a country’s system for monitoring and evaluation. Specifically, the role of parliament, civil society and donors can improve, in innovative ways, the operations of government monitoring and evaluation systems. For Zambia, these actors are key in the development process of the country and their role in making the public sector monitoring and evaluation system better becomes significant. This research study investigated the participation of parliament, civil society organisations and donors in strengthening Zambia’s whole-of-government monitoring and evaluation system. It was found that although their role was recognised, it was rather weak and fragmented. There was generally lack of formalised arrangements pertaining to how these actors needed to engage government in strengthening the function of monitoring and evaluation across the public sector. While donors provided some notable financial and technical support, parliament and civil society had weaker evidence. Nonetheless, donor support was not flexible but fundamentally restricted to areas of their (donor) interest as opposed to national monitoring and evaluation priorities. In the midst of these positive and negative aspects regarding the role of non-state actors, the study has brought out salient insights which if addressed may help improve Zambia’s whole-of-government monitoring and evaluation system. The research has established that going forward, the Government of Zambia will need to engage parliament, civil society and donors meaningfully if these actors were to help accelerate the development and strengthening of the country’s system for monitoring and evaluation. Similarly, the non state actors are also challenged to design and implement their monitoring and evaluation activities alongside government priorities and plans.

actors outside government, parliament, monitoring, evaluation, civil society, donors, culture of results, evidence-based, whole-of-government M & E system, results