Public sector monitoring and evaluation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Implications for Africa

Africa's Public Service Delivery and Performance Review

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Public sector monitoring and evaluation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Implications for Africa
 
Creator Nalubega, Teddy Uwizeyimana, Dominique E.
 
Subject — ourth industrial revolution; 4IR; public policy; monitoring and evaluation; public sector management; Africa.
Description Background: The current era of transformative scientific and technological advances is reshaping traditional government business as it is blurring geographical boundaries and posing a challenge to existing regulatory frameworks.Aim: This article explores the implications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) on current public sector monitoring and evaluation (ME) in Africa.Setting: The 4IR (also called Industry 4.0) is thought to bring about enormous benefits associated with increased efficiency and effectiveness in service delivery. However, even with the highly anticipated opportunities related to automated and digital transformations in the 4IR, governments in African countries need to understand the challenges ahead and will need to measure and mitigate the impact of the unpredictable and rapidly changing products and services created for the public.Methods: Using the documentary review method to collect data, this research answers the following guiding questions: (1) How has the 4IR been harnessed in Africa to improve public sector service delivery? (2) How can the 4IR be harnessed to improve ME in the public sector in Africa? and (3) What are the implications of the 4IR technologies on public sector ME in Africa?Results: Findings reveal that various 4IR disruptive technologies have already been fully adopted in public service delivery in Africa. The 4IR disruptive technologies have the capacity to capture or collect and analyse multi-dimensional information or data from multiple contextual variables, with minimal costs and time in both qualitative and quantitative formats. However, findings disclose that the use of big data in evaluation requires extra new skills training and critical discussions among ME specialists, technologists, economists, engineers and tech companies as a whole so as to significantly enhance the quality, validity and reliability of the data captured by the technologies.Conclusion: Deep integration, collaboration and embracing change are needed to efficiently manage and control the multi-stakeholder nature of the 4IR innovative technologies. This article asserts that policies on the 4IR technologies need to be adaptive, inclusive, sustainable and human centred in order to efficiently regulate or guide these innovative technologies without curtailing the future opportunities.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor
Date 2019-09-10
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — Literary Analysis
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/apsdpr.v7i1.318
 
Source Africa’s Public Service Delivery & Performance Review; Vol 7, No 1 (2019); 12 pages 2310-2152 2310-2195
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://apsdpr.org/index.php/apsdpr/article/view/318/481 https://apsdpr.org/index.php/apsdpr/article/view/318/480 https://apsdpr.org/index.php/apsdpr/article/view/318/482 https://apsdpr.org/index.php/apsdpr/article/view/318/479
 
Coverage Afirca — —
Rights Copyright (c) 2019 Teddy Nalubega, Dominique E. Uwizeyimana https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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