National Training Capacity Supply and Demand Study – Ethiopia
The Ethiopian Public Sector Capacity Building Program (PSCAP) aims to improve the scale, efficiency, and responsiveness of public service delivery at federal, regional and local levels; empower citizens to participate more effectively in shaping their own development; and promote good governance and accountability. These objectives will be achieved by scaling up Ethiopia’s ongoing capacity building and institutional transformation efforts in six priority areas, each developed as a program.
A significant focus of PSCAP effort will be on the training of public sector officials at all levels and covering a wide range of topics and subject areas, enabling them to carry out their duties more efficiently and effectively. On aspect of this has been a study funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to assess the gap between demand and supply for training under PSCAP.
The study focused on four inter-related tasks:
- - An extraction and synthesis of the training demand created by the annual and medium term plans from each region and each federal program under PSCAP;
- - An assessment of the capacity of suppliers providing capacity building training and of their potential to grow to meet the increased demand due to PSCAP;
- - An analysis of the gap between Supply and Demand, and possibilities for closing that gap; and
- - An assessment of current systems for establishing training standards and accreditation of training providers and the development of alternatives to support the rapid growth in capacity building training within Ethiopia.
Civil Service Reform Program (CSRP) Performance Tracking Facility – Phase 1
Cognizant of the urgent need to address a wide array of capacity constraints that hindered the performance of public institutions in Ethiopia, the Government embarked on a comprehensive Civil Service Reform Program (CSRP) in 1996. Reflective of the country’s “first generation” attempts at capacity building, CSRP has sought, first and foremost, to build core technocratic systems within the public sector.Today, CSRP, as a subset of the broader Public Service Capacity Building Program (PSCAP), remains a pivotal element of the government’s capacity building initiatives across the public, private, civil society and higher education sectors. Key challenges for the Government as it proceeds with the full implementation of CSRP is to ensure that it maintains strong coordination across line ministries and tiers of Government, provides clear incentives for behavioural change among civil servants, and that it establishes benchmarks against which to measure impacts. Overall, it is expected that the reforms undertaken under the auspices of the CSRP will make a qualitative change in governance, transparency and accountability within the public sector. These reforms are also seen as making an important contribution to the development of a more robust private sector as well as the building of essential social capital.
Following the Ethiopian Ministry of Capacity Building’s (MCB) engagement of an international consultant to develop a Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, Guidelines, and Action Plan for PSCAP, FIT was approached by the MCB to provide public sector consultancy services related to monitoring and evaluation performance tracking of the CSRP, specifically.
FIT services included:
- review of all relevant PSCAP documents and software;
- conducting interviews with key officials in the pilot institutions;
- making recommendations on staffing, training requirements, equipment and software needs of the pilot institutions;
- developing training materials to guide the selected institutions on the new M&E Performance Tracking system; and
- drafting a manual to help guide the users of the CSRP M&E Performance Tracking system in future.