Dept’s new programme to monitor, manage provinces’ performances

 THE Provincial and Local Government Affairs Department has presented a management tool to support performance monitoring and accountability in the provinces. 

Department acting director Jennifer Adema said: “Since 2006, the department has been receiving reports and these reports submitted by provincial administrators were sometimes not submitted in time, and reports submitted were of poor quality and inaccurate, which made performance, monitoring and accountability of funds poor.” 

The provincial management tool is an initiative that will:

• Capture data in real time at facility time;
• Incorporate key sectors –service delivery indicators; 
• Produces quarterly reports, MPA reports and financial expenditure and graphs to show performance per quarter;
• Be a database where key data is stored for decision makers; and 
• This will be used as a one-stop-shop for key indicators to be incorporated whereby provinces will be rated based on their performance.

“With this new management tool, provincial administrators can now accurately report how they use funds and for which indicators they were used for,” Adema said. 

“The management tool will be the standard template with calculated formulas that will be used by provincial administrators to track their expenditures, facility register, and a graph showing expenditure against allocation of funds. 

“Once this is done, a report will be generated and then submitted to the department to effectively track performance of each province around the country.” 

She said the management tool would give the department a clear profile of each province by defining provincial performance indicators, strengthening and improving systems to monitor provincial performance, assess the provincial capacity trends and rate the provinces according to agreed indicators. 

“The management tool will assist in incorporating the minimum standards and will assist the expenditures in the development support grants at the provincial, district and local level government level and other government funding.”

The management tool was presented to the provincial administrators yesterday at Gateway Hotel at the 2013 provincial administrators’ annual conference.