Nigerian evaluator Michael Ale calls for evidence-based budgets

Nigerian evaluator Michael Ale called on the federal government to base its public policies, budget decisions and development programmes on evidence in order to strengthen accountability and improve service delivery. He was speaking in a keynote address entitled "Who owns the evidence? Strengthening national evaluation capacity, ownership and accountability for sustainable development", at the third annual conference of the Nigerian Association of Evaluators, Tribune Online reports.

According to Michael Ale, Nigeria's main problem is not the absence of data, policy documents or evaluation reports, but the failure to use the available evidence to guide decisions and measure the impact of public interventions on citizens. He judged that the country could not achieve sustainable development if institutions and public officials systematically ignored evaluation findings. "A country can have many evaluation reports without having a solid national evaluation system. It can have sophisticated data platforms without a culture of evidence-based decision-making," he said.

The evaluator also stressed the need to distinguish audit from evaluation: audit examines financial compliance and the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of public spending, while evaluation assesses the relevance, impact and sustainability of government policies and programmes. He recalled that Nigeria has made progress with the introduction of the National Monitoring and Evaluation Policy in August 2022, but that weaknesses in institutional capacity, coordination, technology and use of results continued to undermine its effective implementation. Michael Ale cited the 2021-2025 National Development Plan, which identified insufficient monitoring and evaluation capacity, weak compliance with standard procedures, donor-driven evaluations and an excessive focus on activities rather than results among the main challenges.