What gets measured, gets done!
The County Government of Kisumu has convened a Performance Contracting Inception meeting with a team of external consulting evaluators to prepare its key workforce on the upcoming End Year Performance Evaluation set to kick-start on Monday 7th August, 2022.
The meeting brought together Members of the County Executive, Chief Officers, Directors, Departmental Accountants, Human Resource and Procurement Officers, Performance Champions as well as other technical staff assistants steering the overall County agenda.
The essence of Performance Contracting Management in government is to help nurture a culture of performance and accountability within the workforce and improve in general, service delivery to the citizenry through the achievement of the county’s strategic objectives. It is a binding commitment to deliver on the priorities alongside ensuring efficiency, effectiveness, and competence within government.
The End of Year Performance Contracting Evaluation for FY 2022/2023 is meant to assess the extent the departments have performed as per the set targets with the objective of linking departmental Performance with the overall County Performance.
Beginning Monday, the departments shall be subjected to an evaluation process based on the previous performance contracts signed for FY 2022/2023. The exercise shall see the consultant evaluators and the departments visiting some of the sites where implementation of various projects took place.
This is meant to entrench openness within government where officers are assessed on existing projects as opposed to before where officers would indicate non-existing projects.
Performance Contracting has been a culture in the private sector but is now gaining traction in the public sector spaces. Performance Management as a tool of service delivery was introduced by the Kibaki administration and was domiciled in the Ministry of Economic Planning then headed by Prof. Anyang Nyongo, now the Governor of Kisumu County.
In the counties, Performance Contracting was rolled out in the 2014/2015 financial year by undertaking capacity building and offering technical support to County governments on performance management and its key tools.
Kisumu County, under the leadership of H.E Governor Prof. Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o has been at the forefront in championing for performance contracts and has over the years subjected it’s leadership in signing performance contracts. This has resulted in tremendous improvement in terms of service delivery since he took oath of office in 2017.
During the interactive session, the consultants also took the officers through the performance contracting evaluation process and the critical documents they need to arm themselves with when the process commences next week.
First team to face the evaluators on Monday will be the Department of Trade, Tourism, Industry and Marketing, followed by Infrastructure, Energy, and Public Works.