SHIPDET Special Topic Courses on Results-Based Planning, Budgeting, Monitoring and Evaluation held in Chengdu
The third SHIPDET Special Topic Courses on Results-Based Planning, Budgeting, Monitoring and Evaluation of the year, which is co-sponsored by the Ministry of Finance of China and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and co-organized by the Asia-Pacific Finance and Development Center (AFDC) and the Asia-Pacific Community of Practice on Managing for Development Results (APCoP), was held from August 12-16, 2013 in Chengdu, PRC.
The training attracts 49 participants from Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyz Republic, and PRC. The majority of them are from the Ministry of Finance, with a few from line ministries, such as Ministry of Health and Ministry of Melioration and Water Resources. And half of them are from local finance departments/bureaus of Sichuan province, PRC.
Ms. Farzana Ahmed, Lead Results Management Specialist at ADB, and Dr. Peng Runzhong, Director of AFDC, jointly opened the training on August 12. They briefly touched upon the background of APCoP, AFDC, SHIPDET and the current training course and wished for active participation and lively exchanges from the participants, and fruitful results of the training.
Mr. Ronnie Dawnes, Deputy Head of Budgeting and Public Expenditures Division of OECD and Ms. Nina Blondal, the impact evaluation expert from Denmark are the core instructors of the training. Mr. Dawnes started his teaching by addressing the important linkages between planning and budgeting, then went on to talk about the challenges of budgeting execution and monitoring. After that he introduced the MTET which is a powerful tool for linking planning and budgeting and then ended by talking about budgeting in a decentralized environment. Nina then introduced to participants the management tool of results-based M&E, and the methods and approaches of impact evaluation and used a case study on China to give participants a better hands-on learning on how to do impact evaluation in actual practice.
Participants also presented on their country cases amid the experts’ thematic presentations and have lively interactions with both experts and other participants. They were also divided into six groups to perform several group discussion tasks and then to report on their group discussion results subsequently. This special training modality, which attaches equal importance to experts’ teaching and peer learning, is very helpful in promoting in-depth understanding of the training topic by participants from different backgrounds, survey shows.
Besides the OECD and Denmark experts, a Chinese expert on government budgeting, Prof. Wang Yongjun, Dean of the research institute of the Central University of Finance and Economics of China were also invited as a resource person to present at this training. He presented on the progress, challenges, and outlooks of performance-based planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation in China. This session was very thought-provoking and enlightening, which also helped participants learn more about China and the topic at hand.
This is the third training of the year and also the seventh joint endeavor between AFDC and ADB on the training programs of this same topic. More similar programs will be carried out in the future to strengthen capacity building of results-based public sector management in the region.
