The governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Yemi Cardoso, says monitoring and evaluation of development projects are crucial to their overall success.

Mr Cardoso said this on Monday in Abuja at the opening of a regional workshop on project management, monitoring and evaluation organised by the West African Institute for Financial and Economic Management (WAIFEM).

The CBN governor was represented by Dr Yusuf Bulus of the monetary policy department of the CBN.

According to him, the world today is tense with challenges across all sectors.

“Resources are increasingly becoming inadequate to address these emerging challenges.

“Managing scarce resources has become very necessary in a very tight fiscal environment that is characterised by growing human conflict, geo-economic fragmentation, the cost of living crunch, and climate change.

“These conditions have put pressure on public finances, and the government has to implement fiscal measures to balance competing priorities with available resources,’’ he said.

He said that as governments and organisations assessed, designed, and implemented crucial interventions, an important component of project management and implementation that required due attention was the monitoring and evaluation design.

“The monitoring and evaluation framework is the foundation of any development project and is key to its successful implementation and achieving envisaged project goals and objectives,’’ he said.

The director-general of WAIFEM, Dr Baba Musa, said that the success of projects depended on the identification of the defining moments throughout the phases of project execution.

Mr Musa said that this encompassed the life cycle of the project, which includes initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, evaluation, and closure.

According to him, you can perform an evaluation test after every phase to ensure that progress is sustained up to the end of the project.

“Poor management of project outcomes can result in the objectives of the project not being realised.

“Monitoring and evaluation are, in this regard, a continuous management function to assess if progress is made in achieving expected results.

“They will also help to spot bottlenecks in implementation and highlight whether there are any unintended effects or risks,’’ he said.

According to him, the workshop is expected to equip participants with skills in setting up and implementing projects based on how the monitoring and evaluation system works.

WAIFEM is a collaborative sub-regional capacity-building organisation established in July 1996 by the central banks of five Anglophone West African countries.

Its mission is to develop human and institutional expertise in the fields of macroeconomic, fiscal, debt and financial management for central banks and other relevant MDAs.

(NAN)