The African origin of public policy, programme and project monitoring and evaluation (M&E) practices

Abstract

The literature has robust contestation about the origin of public policy, programme and project monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Cloete (2016) argues that public policy, programme and project M&E originated in Europe and America and was introduced in Africa by colonisers who divided the African continent among themselves in the early 1880s. Cloete (2016) does not explain why there was no public policy, programme or project M&E in Africa or any other non-western part of the world before the arrival of western colonisers. Mouton (2010) also argues that M&E was introduced in Africa by international development organisations and financial organisations in the 1980s. According to Mouton (2010), these western development organisations and financial institutions introduced M&E to the African continent as a condition for accessing foreign aid and as a funding requirement for the projects these institutions were funding. Neither Mouton (2010) nor Cloete (2016) accounts for ample literature which demonstrates that M&E practices existed in Africa (and in China) thousands of years before the arrival of the international development organisation and international financial organisations in these parts of the world. This paper uses the Secondary Data Analysis (Archival Study) approach to provide a systematic and chronological analysis of the available literature to trace the genesis of public policy, programme and project M&E as a practice. The findings in this paper indicate that M&E could potentially have become a practice in African countries such as Egypt and Asian countries such as China long before it was a practice in the U.S. and European countries. However, evidence suggests that academics and practitioners in the U.S. and European countries could have compiled the first recorded theoretical academic content about M&E models and approaches currently being used to train people who want to take up a career or profession in M&E.