Treasury to hold conference to find ways to combat graft

NAIROBI, KENYA: The National Treasury, through its Monetary and Evaluation Unit, will be holding a national conference at the end of this month to find ways by which policy makers can properly utilise research to combat corruption and bad governance.

The conference will be bringing together policy makers from a number of African countries including South Africa, Uganda and Botswana, as well as local think tanks beginning with Universities, the Vision 2030, the International Center for Evaluation and Development (ICED) among others.

Dr Samson Machuka, the Director of Monitoring and Evaluation at the Treasury said in an interview that in a country where graft is endemic, state-sponsored infrastructure projects have become strong conduits for corrupt bureaucrats to milk public coffers.

This is when projects are budgeted for and tenders awarded, but no monitoring or evaluation is done to understand what value these projects brought to the taxpayer.

“You will find that in a country like South Africa, Monitoring and Evaluation is given a whole ministry. In Uganda it’s a whole commission. But Kenya its just a unit which is not very well funded. It makes monitoring the projects a bit hard,” said Dr Machuka.

Machuka also explained that the conference will be used to try and connect how research in monitoring and evaluation can be used efficiently and put into effect to ensure projects don’t unnecessarily bleed money and benefit the corrupt.

“You will find that there is a lot of research on project management which is not used well in Kenya to combat graft. The conference will seek ways to find out how this research can be utilized,” Machuka averred.