Budget Support and Efficient Service Delivery in Zambia

Project description

The German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) is a multidisciplinary research, advisory, and training institute for Germany’s bilateral and multilateral development cooperation. It is jointly funded by the Federal Government of Germany and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
On the basis of independent research, DIE acts as an advisor to public institutions in Germany and abroad on current issues of development and cooperation between developed and developing countries.
Postgraduate training at the DIE focuses on empirical and policy-oriented research projects carried out by Country Working Groups (CWG) comprising between four and six postgraduates supervised by a member of DIE’s academic staff. Every research project involves an 11-week empirical field study. Before being published in the DIE Studies series, the findings of the CWG are presented and discussed in detail in country as well as with experts on the topic in Germany.

Context:
Evaluation departments of cooperating partners have started a series of evaluations of budget support including a joint evaluation of budget support in Zambia. This evaluation was initiated by the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs (IOB), the Evaluation and Audit Department of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ-E) and the Secretariat for Evaluation of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).
The Secretary to the Treasury in Zambia has given full support to the evaluation.
As part of this joint effort DIE has been commissioned by BMZ-E to carry out an evaluation component concerned with the political processes and economy of budget support in Zambia.

Project:
This Country Working Group (CWG) research project – while not forming an integral part of the joint evaluation – is closely coordinated with and aims at directly contributing to the evaluation work.
It will be carried out in close cooperation with the Economics Association of Zambia (EAZ) and the different evaluation teams.
The main research interest concerns the identification of constraints to efficient service delivery at local government level in Zambia. The focus is on the operational efficiency of local public financial management (PFM) in health, education and rural roads maintenance.
The CWG aims at conducting comparative in-depth case studies of sub-national service delivery in the selected sectors. For this purpose, relative efficiency measures will be constructed based on administrative data on sub-national service delivery and budget allocations. Qualitative in-depth studies will then be conducted to identify determinants of unexplained differences in efficiency between selected districts.
The main contribution of this research will consist in providing for a clearer understanding of (i) how budget allocations in Zambia are transformed into service delivery and the provision of public goods in the selected sectors (health, education, roads), and (ii) how the operational efficiency of budget implementation in Zambia could be improved.
The CWG’s findings should inform the joint evaluation of budget support in Zambia but at the same time be of direct use to the Government of Zambia, in particular the sector ministries concerned as well as the Ministry of Finance and National Planning (MoFNP).