KATHMANDU, JANUARY 12

The Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration has made an amendment to the 'Local Level Institutional Capacity Self-evaluation Procedure' to identify strengths and weaknesses of the local governments by assessing their performance and outcomes for the purpose of making them competitive and more effective.

The thematic areas of self-evaluation of local units comprises governance arrangements, organisation and administration, annual budget and planning management, fiscal and financial management, public service delivery, judicial performance, physical infrastructure, social inclusion, environment protection and disaster management, and coordination and collaboration.

The MoFAGA has already developed a software for data entry, storage, security, presentation and disclosure of self-evaluation results in the form of a report.

As per the procedure, each of the thematic areas will have separate indicators for self-evaluation. Maximum mark per indicator has been fixed at 1. Poor performance, moderate performance and excellent performance will get 0, 0.5 and 1 respectively.

'It requires the local levels to complete their self-evaluation and send the final results to the concerned district coordination committee, Office of the Chief Minister and Council of Ministers of the province and the MoFAGA by mid-January of each fiscal,' it says.

The procedure has made it mandatory for all local levels to adopt the self-evaluation process as stated in the this procedure. The concerned departments, divisions and sections shall be involved in self-evaluation of the thematic areas.

The chief administrative officer shall designate a focal person, and the concerned departments, divisions and sections shall provide the results of the indicators determined for each thematic areas to the focal person.

According to the procedure, the focal person consolidates the results of self-evaluation of the local level and submits it to the chief administrative officer. Then the chief administrative officer shall present consolidated results of self-evaluation at the meeting of the executive office, which is the final authority for determining the final results with scores.

The executive office shall publish the final results of self-evaluation on the website of the concerned local level and post it on the notice board before sending it to the concerned district coordination committee, Office of the Chief Minister and Council of Ministers of the province and the MoFAGA.

The MoFAGA prepares a consolidated report comprising the self-evaluation results of all 753 local levels and conducts capacity development programmes for such local governments, which are found to be poor in results. The MoFAGA will also officially declare the name of meritorious local levels and decide the amount of fiscal transfer to the local governments based on the results.

A version of this article appears in the print on January 13, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.