Introducing digitalisation to strengthen evaluation systems for democracy in African parliaments

ABSTRACT

African parliaments are a unique institutional context for evidence use, and processes for digitalisation have specific implications for how evidence systems can contribute to democracy. While African parliaments have organisational features that make introducing technology challenging, they also hold significant promise for using digitalisation as a tool to strengthen democratic governance both within parliaments themselves, and also across the executive. This article shares experiences introducing a research management tool in two African parliaments, and reflects on what it means for the role evaluation plays in strengthening democracy. This is through looking at the technical components of digitalisation, the contextual components, and the political and values driven elements of the parliamentary context. This article describes these components, and reflects on their implications for the way democratic evaluation is understood in a context of African governance.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the Centre for Learning on Evaluation and Results for supporting the development of the African POT, and for funding the work on Strengthening Legislative Oversight. The authors would also like to thank the participating parliaments, who invested limitless time and resources into integrating the African POT into their systems. While the authors received significant advice from a range of parliamentary partners, any errors remaining in the manuscript are those of the authors alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The introduction to the African POT was made to all parliamentary staff involved in the parliamentary research, M&E and IT support functions at the inception of the pilot process, which was in November 2020, following more than two years of engaged scoping, exploration, and collaborative development. The decision to delay its introduction to all MPs was based on the need to wait for the conclusion of the national general elections in order to target newly elected MPs and integrate the training on its use into the formal induction training for parliamentarians.