ICED is positioning itself as a thought leader in M&E systems development and capacity enhancement across Africa. Governments across sub Saharan Africa struggles to deliver services to citizens in efficient, effective and timely manner with its attendant negative effects on livelihoods and quality of life. ICED wants to change the current narrative by tapping into a vast array of M&E expertise and tools to promote transparency and accountability for better service delivery, expenditure management and enhanced policy and decision-making. ICED intends to guide governments through learning and adaptive management to improve public sector management to deliver results aimed at changing the socio-economic conditions of the African people.

ICED Public/Private Institutional M&E system strategy development will focus on positioning itself to provide the following services to African governments and other clients in the following areas:

• Promote evaluative thinking and develop capacity in evidence-based management through results chain modeling and theory of change mapping
• Build monitoring and evaluation capacity through learning events and coaching with emphasis on collaboration, learning and adaptive management. This will be based on carefully developed ICED learning modules/tools.
• Support governments to prepare Government-wide results framework and sector results frameworks
• Support governments to establish results delivery units across government
• Support governments and other clients to develop monitoring tools such as dashboards, scorecard systems and templates for annual progress reporting.
• Make available ICED’s expertise to develop monitoring and evaluation policy, guidelines, norms and standards

Governments, donors, and other key actors across the continent are recognizing the importance of M&E – and research and evidence more broadly – to drive decision-making. Similarly, the spread of technology is enabling more agile, timely, and cost-effective data collection and analysis. There is a also a good range of African-led organizations conducting rigorous M&E – at varying levels of scale – with strong understanding of local contexts and language, trusted relationships with beneficiaries, and often strong convening power of individuals and organizations. Underpinning this is a growing focus on M&E that is ‘Made in Africa.’ The Made in Africa agenda is focused on embedding evaluation in the worldviews, methodologies and interests of the African continent, rather than the bias toward Western priorities and approaches. ICED has the potential to contribute to furthering this agenda by becoming a significant player in the African context.