Implementation of Programme of Action
The final product of every peer review process is a Country Report, which has been adopted by the APR Forum, and a consolidated and validated Programme of Action (POA) on the methods which will be used to improve the governance practices and shortcomings detailed in the report. The Programme of Action commits a country's government (in partnership with other stakeholders) to a detailed number of specifically defined targets and interventions over a five year period with the overall aim of improving a country's governance practices. Once this POA has been made available for public scrutiny, civil society has the opportunity and responsibility (given its stake in the preceding national review), to engage with and even assist government where applicable in implementing the strategies outlined in the framework. This is possibly the most important area in which the non-government sector has the opportunity to engage with the government in improving the country's governance practices, and in holding it accountable to the targets that the government itself agreed to achieve in the POA.
The nature of the process of drafting a country's POA ensures that each country's framework will be unique. It is therefore incumbent upon civil society organizations with an interest or stake in the APRM process in a country to examine the report, identify areas in which their organization can engage in the APRM and implement potential interventions and cooperation with the implementing agencies in question.
As has been noted, each country's POA will reflect its own unique governance challenges and the interventions proposed to address these challenges will therefore also vary between countries. However, as the POA is designed using a method reminiscent of various formulations of the Logical Framework Approach for project management, it outlines several key variables in addressing the issues highlighted in a country report which make monitoring and engagement more accessible to non-implementing organizations. It is therefore possible by examining a country POA to identify specific areas of intervention which a civil society organization or group of organizations can interact with and monitor for progress. Each intervention outlined in the POA therefore will include:
- An anticipated and desired result;
- performance indicators as a means of verifying the result;
- projects/Activities aimed at achieving the result;
- budget;
- timeframes;
- an implementing agency primarily responsible for undertaking activities;
- partners/stakeholder organizations;
- an agency responsible for monitoring and evaluating the outcomes of the intervention.
Diagram 1: Excerpt from Ghana's POA
In early instances, civil society organizations have been tasked with the responsibilities of the implementing agency, and have also been named as stakeholder partners and monitoring agencies. Whilst this provides anecdotal evidence of the potential for engagement in the POA, the tasks outlined in the framework most often require significantly greater interventions than any one agency can effectively undertake, creating a need for extensive and sustained involvement between the official implementing agencies and civil society at large. In order to achieve the desired outcomes outlined in the POA, it is therefore essential that civil society deliberately engages with the POA and implementing agencies on an ongoing basis. The implementation of a country's POA provides one of the best formal opportunities ever presented to civil society by government to partner with government agencies in addressing governance deficits, and has the potential to make a significant difference to the governance practices of African states.