HUYE—Local leaders should look at monitoring and evaluation as a means to efficient service delivery, an official from the Decentralisation and Community Development Project.

Officer Jeanne Malikani Sugira called upon an evaluation team to consider their work inclusive of advising local leaders on executing performance contracts.

"In the past, evaluation teams have only played the role of judge, without finding possible solutions to problems highlighted in their reports,” said Sugira.

"It is not enough to tell a local leader that he got ‘zero points’ and not tell them how to improve in their weak points,” he said. "That is the whole essence of monitoring and evaluation.”

He added that monitoring and evaluation should be done on a daily basis so that problems are rectified when the process is ongoing.

The provincial monitoring and evaluation team comprises of government, private sector and civil society officials.

Nizeyimana Makeba, a member, said that the team would be given knowledge on the techniques of monitoring and evaluation so that the impending exercise was done professionally.

"Monitoring teams in the past have tended to look at the end product while neglecting the process when we know well that sometimes the process my take a much longer time than the actual execution,” said Makeba.

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