BUSIA COUNTY GOVERNMENT WINS THREE M&E AWARDS
The County Government of Busia has won three awards at the 10th Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) week held in Kisumu.
The week-long conference brought together practitioners of M & E in the country both National & County Governments, private sector, development partners and academia to consolidate on the gains and explore ways of sustaining the practice.
During the closing ceremony, individuals who have been consistent in the efforts to ensure that M&E is recognised and integrated as a critical component in the development process within their jurisdiction in the Public sector were awarded.
Chief of Staff and Private Secretary to the Governor, Mr Robert Papa was instrumental in the county’s success story with three awards to its credit. To receive them on behalf of Busia Governor, H.E Sospeter Ojaamong was Acting Finance Executive, Phaustine Barasa.
The Governor in a speech read on his behalf by Ms Barasa said in order to deliver the promise of devolution to county residents, his government embarked on setting up structures and getting the right capacities at the county.
“As a Governor who has served two terms since the advent of devolution, our focus has been to improve service delivery to our people. In doing this we have been faced with numerous challenges ranging from inadequate capacity, lack of enough financial resources and the high expectations from the citizens,” he said.
He added: “One key capacity was in the area of monitoring and evaluating our county projects. Indeed we had a number of projects that were not implemented properly. Some were over budget and we had to do variations and others were delayed. When a project is delayed the citizens don’t get value for their taxes.”
He went on, ” We embarked on adopting monitoring and evaluation. Put in place a monitoring unit. Got staff in the unit. And went further to recruit staff and deploy them to all departments. As a result of this , we now adopted CIMES and operationalized monitoring and evaluation committees upto the village level.”
” This has been augmented by the county assembly which also oversights us. As we speak now we have operationalized eCIMES and make data visualization very simple and easy through dashboards.
In my office I can easily follow the departments performance from my computer and even phone, while away I can see departments turning green, blue, amber yellow and red,” he noted.
He concluded:” The net effect of this is that our project completion rates have risen from 43% to 82%. There are no
variations, and contractors who unnecessarily delay projects are blacklisted.
Moving forward we have adopted culture of accountability for results. M & E reports are now a prerequisite for payments, we continue to capacity build monitoring and evaluation teams, we have a policy on M& E which allocates 2% of county development budgets to M & E. What gets measured gets done.”
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