Comparative Analysis of Monitoring and Evaluation Systems for Zambia’s Health and Agriculture Sectors

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) has increasingly become the buzz word in the implementation of poverty reduction strategies. Because of the anticipated benefits which are associated to it, M&E has fundamentally become a global phenomenon whereby national and international stakeholders in the development arena have continuously sought for enhanced public governance based on results. The aim of the paper was to investigative the sector monitoring and evaluation systems in the context of poverty reduction strategies focusing on a comparative case study of Zambia‘s Health and Agriculture sectors. A diagnostic assessment and analysis was employed to undertake the investigative study using existing literature. Consequently, results have shown that out of the six assessment criteria, the agriculture sector M&E performs better than the health M&E on four components—policy, organization, capacity and the use of M&E information. The only criterion where the health sector M&E is more developed than that of agriculture is ‗methodology‘ while the two sectors scored same for the ‗participation of actors outside of government‘ criterion. Nevertheless, there is need for accelerated development and strengthening of sector M&E systems for health and agriculture. Although the agriculture sector compares well against the health sector M&E, there are more gaps that require attention if both sectors were to enjoy the benefits that go with a successfully implemented mechanism. For both sectors, there is need for instance, to step up efforts of ensuring that the roles of the Zambia Statistics Agency, parliament, Civil Society and the Ministry of Finance and National Planning are well defined and enforced. The weaknesses that exist regarding the rationalization and coordination of donor M&E and sector M&E undermine capacity to have strong supply and demand sides.