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As the primary safe guarders of democracy, parliaments have a central role to play in countries’ development efforts. Their primary functions of law-making, budgeting and oversight, and representation are critical in ensuring good governance, accountability and transparency.

For parliaments to perform these functions, they require quality evidence, which includes routine administrative information, budget expenditure reports, monitoring and evaluation reports, citizen reports, research publications, among others. The primary evidence systems and structures in parliaments include parliamentary budget offices, research departments, committee sections, legal offices/counsels, library and information resources, and IT support.

While these structures are existing in parliaments in the region, they are often inadequately staffed and equipped and therefore unable to support sustained use of evidence in parliamentary debate and decision-making. These realities mean that parliaments in the region need to make deliberate efforts to sustain investments in strengthening their institutional evidence systems and structures.

Since some parliaments have made more progress than others, it is important for parliaments to learn from each other and draw from existing resources and tools in other countries and at regional levels. It is also well known that in most parliamentary contexts, evidence has to compete with other factors that shape and inform parliamentary debate and decisions. A critical factor that evidence has to compete within parliament is politics, often manifesting in the form of party and political interests.

In sub-Saharan African countries, for instance, many parliaments must also contend with weak institutional systems, structures and capacities – factors that also hinder the sustained use of evidence in parliamentary debate and decision-making.

Developing regional resources for parliaments in the region, to learn from other parliaments in their efforts to strengthen their evidence systems for better and quality debate and decision-making, must therefore remain a priority for both scholars and practitioners.

This is an excerpt published originally by African Sun Media and contributing authors.

Access the full publication here: https://bit.ly/3MH9X1X