MONITORING AND EVALUATION VISITS

One critical aspect of ensuring government business continuity and growth is allowing room for constant engagement and communication with stakeholders. SRC recognises this and has been engaging different stakeholders, while aiming to ensure that their needs are identified, understood and met.

Collaborating with stakeholders can enhance the achievement of SRC’s mandate, and therefore, there is need to build good working relationships.

Why undertake monitoring and evaluation?

In order to enhance adherence levels, SRC monitors the implementation of the remuneration and benefits it has set, reviewed and advised, through undertaking regular M&E visits and continuous engagement with stakeholders.

During such M&E visits, SRC seeks to achieve the following:

• Understand the extent of implementation of SRC guidelines, regulations, circulars and decisions.
• Monitor adherence levels in relation to SRC circulars.
• Provide interpretation and clarification to SRC circulars.
• Monitor implementation of corrective measures, as advised by SRC from time to time.
• Build partnerships and synergies with stakeholders who consume and/or implement SRC circulars.

The public service wage bill has been rising over the years and there has been concerted effort by government to bring it to a level that is affordable and fiscally sustainable. Counties, universities and other government agencies have presented unsustainably high levels of spending on the wage bill.

This, negatively impacts on development and service provision by crowding out resources that could otherwise be used for development priorities, such as social and infrastructure development programmes and projects.

To strengthen the management of the public service wage bill, SRC and stakeholders in county governments need to regularly and consistently analyse the wage bill data towards the identification of emerging wage bill trends and intrinsic characteristics of the trends.

Over time, M&E visits have observed that:

• The wage bill to revenue ratio in all the public universities visited is beyond the 35 per cent threshold as guided by the Public Finance Management (PFM) Act.
• Public universities are at different cycles of Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs), implementation for different trade unions.
• Most public universities negotiated CBAs with different trade unions at different times, causing implementation challenges.
• Implementation of horizontal and vertical advice for the 2017/2021 CBA is still a challenge in most of the universities due to different interpretations and financial constraints.
• Most public universities pay allowances that are not advised by SRC, especially at management levels.
• Most public universities are unable to meet their financial obligations due to high operating deficits.
• All public universities have lopsided workforce with the non-academic personnel out-numbering the academic staff.

Besides getting stakeholder views and proposals on how the respective institution is managing its wage bill, SRC sought to obtain feedback with respect to the following areas:

• Collective Bargaining Negotiations (CBNs) and taking stock of the challenges.
• Financial prudence in universities.
• Discipline differentiated remunerations.
• Role of university councils in CBNs vis-à-vis the role of Inter-Public University Council Consultative Forum (IPUCCF) in the remuneration of public universities.

After its establishment a decade ago, SRC set and gazetted remuneration and benefits for State officers at the national and county governments. Since then, SRC has issued several circulars and guidelines on different issues pertaining to remuneration and benefits.

During M&E visits, SRC sought areas of collaboration with county governments on the following areas:

• Monitoring and evaluation of remuneration and benefits advice and guidelines.
• Sensitisation and capacity building for effective execution of mandates and service delivery.
• Partnership and joint implementation of the 8th Summit Resolutions of the National Wage Bill Conference, 2019.
• Management of the wage bill to release more resources for development.

SRC is highly committed to stakeholder engagement as a continuous and systematic process in order to establish synergistic partnerships.