Monitoring and evaluation of municipal planning

There is a growing concern about the lack of skilled municipal employees who can deliver essential services to under-resourced local communities in South Africa. However, coaching and mentoring appear underutilized to train municipal employees to improve service delivery to local communities. The study aims to investigate whether coaching and mentoring could capacitate municipal employees whose performance appraisal reveals a lack of skills to provide essential services. A cross-sectional research design was adopted to conduct a survey. The target population comprised 265 municipal employees, and a stratified random sample of 115 employees completed a questionnaire. The employees held positions of general managers, general assistants, and administrators, with varied years of experience. Cronbach’s Alpha indicated an overall high 0.8 questionnaire reliability score.
Using a quantitative method, responses from municipal employees were collected to examine their perceptions of the influence of training and development on employee performance and service delivery. Hypotheses were tested using the bivariant inferential statistical tests of correlation (r) and Chi-square (χ2). The results indicated that training and development were more likely to improve employee performance. Furthermore, the results showed that trained employees were more likely to improve service delivery. In particular, coaching and mentoring could be used to improve performance. Therefore, the study found that the municipality was not providing employees with relevant training and development to enable them to address poor service delivery. Finally, the study recommends that the municipality invests in training and development to enrich employees with new skills and knowledge to improve the quality of service delivery.

Quality management systems in public organizations influence the quality of service delivery outputs. The purpose of this study was to determine the quality of service delivery at Community Service Centres (CSC) of the South African Police Service (SAPS) in the Western Cape, South Africa. A mixed-method research approach was employed to gather data for the study. Both a survey questionnaire and in-depth interviews were used to collect the data. The sample data set contacted 300 respondents from three policing areas situated in the Western Cape Metropolis. The main findings indicated that clients were satisfied with the level of service they received from the SAPS. However, the main area of concern was the absence of service delivery initatives at three police stations.

This review aims at assessing the economic evaluation of public programmes such as the expanded public works programmes (EPWP) in South Africa. The South African government earmarked the EPWP for departments and municipalities to implement projects that are meaningful for economic transformation and inclusive growth. This study argues that economic evaluation of public programmes must consider the interplay of complex decisions making on resource allocations and take into account consequences thereafter in a systematic way. This review paper adopted a qualitative document analysis, where data is drawn from research reports on programme evaluation, policy documents, EPWP evaluation reports, books and articles drawn from accredited journals. Key findings from this study draw attention to unfulfilled great expectations to sustain job creation in an emerging economy in South Africa. Results also revealed that although the M&E design was suitable for the evaluation, it was not compared to any other alternative cost-effective measurement strategy to assess the economic value of the EPWP in South African public service. Based on the lessons from EPWP, this study recommends an integrative approach to evaluate job creation programmes in order to settle on the economic value of EPWP.