Monitoring and Evaluation and Its Impact on the Performance of the Sizakala Customer Services Department Employees At Ethekwini Municipality

Abstract

Background: Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is deemed to be the very crucial initiative that needs to be implemented by all the organizations to accomplish its goals and objectives to be successful. Monitoring and Evaluation helps organizations to see the progression of service delivery. It enhances accountability and helps the organizations to accomplish the set targets (Huq, Holvoet and Huq 2020:1-2). A comprehensive Monitoring and Evaluation capacitates project facilitators, decision-makers, and budget designers to identify tactics that work and to improve those do not work (Kananura, Ekirapa-Kiracho, Paina, Bumba, Mulekwa, Nakiganda-Busiku, Lin Oo, Kiwanuka, George and Peters 2017:56).

Aim: The intent of this study is to emphasize the significance of Monitoring and Evaluation of performances to the public managers. The study is to be administered with an intention of escalating the levels of the departmental performance by encouraging the monitoring and evaluation of the daily activities of the employees.

Setting: The sample size is 43 employees, constituting Sizakala permanent general staff, a Monitoring practitioner (dealing with organizational performance monitoring), a Monitoring practitioner (dealing with individual performance monitoring), a Project Evaluation practitioner, a Program Evaluation practitioner and a Sizakala manager.

Method: Manual analysis was conducted to analyse the qualitative data. Descriptive statistics and one sample t-test were used. Descriptive statistics with graphics were used to elaborate on the quantitative research findings, and sample t-test were utilized to determine whether the mean score is notably unique from the variable quantity value and the graphs were utilized to conduct the quantitative analysis. The one-sample t-test determines whether the sample mean is statistically different from a known or hypothesized population mean.

Results: All participants understand what Monitoring and or Evaluation is. Monitoring is executed for the Sizakala department. Evaluation is not yet implemented for the Sizakala department. The results revealed that M&E helps employees to improve their performance when compared to years M&E was not introduced. The unit’s major challenge is that they do not have experienced staff and skilled personnel to understand M&E.

Conclusion: There is not enough funding for conducting M&E initiatives for the Sizakala department. As a result, the Performance Monitoring and Evaluation unit has not conducted any evaluation for the Sizakala unit.