Historically, there is the concern of evaluating public programs in general and social programs in particular. For years, the production of technical knowledge in the pursuit of improved standards of management in the public sector has always been much more oriented to the processes of formulation of programs than those related to its implementation and evaluation.
The negative economic growth caused a demand for action and social services, especially the nature of compensation.
The systematic, continuous and effective evaluation of these programs can be the key tool for achieving better results providing a better use and control of resources that they use.
Regardless the situation of crisis, the assessment of performance has always been important in the public sector. Efforts to reform the state take place in all countries of the planet providing a wonderful challenge: making it work better, but with a lower cost.
The pursuit of this improvement is the evaluation of the performance of the public programs, the opportunity and chance to assess to the performance of the state organization.
Establishing effectiveness, efficiency and effectiveness as measures of government success are created ways to evaluate different alternatives to achieve similar results.
The authority and power is delegated to the autonomous agencies and private companies to run their services, increasing the need for evaluation. In fact, privatization of public services increased autonomy granted to public agencies, requiring the adoption of ways of defining performance in contract, based on the prior definition of indicators and measures of success.
That requires that the government develop tools and evaluation methodologies, consistent to offer a stronger leadership for making decisions on public policy for a more accurate assessment on the performance of such agencies.
The purpose of the evaluation is to guide the decision-makers, advising them about the continuity, the need for corrections or suspension of a particular policy or program. If the assessment is a way to measure the performance of programs, it is necessary to establish measures to gauge results. They are called the evaluation criteria and that point has been the consensus on conceptual and methodological issues in the evaluation of programs and policies.
The list of criteria that can be used is long and the choice of one or several of them, depends on the aspects you want to focus on evaluation. The most common are:
- Efficiency - resulted in economic term that means the lowest cost / benefit possible to achieve the objectives set in the program;
- Effectiveness - measure of the degree to which the program achieves its objectives and targets;
- Impact (or effectiveness) - indicates that the project has an effect (positive) in the external environment in which intervened on a technical, economic, socio-cultural, institutional and environmental factors;
- Sustainability - measures the ability to continue the beneficial effects achieved through the social program, after it ends;
- Cost-effectiveness - like the idea of opportunity cost and the concept of relevance, is the comparison of alternative forms of social action to achieve certain effects, to be selected this activity / project that meets the objectives with the cost;
- Satisfaction of the beneficiary - evaluates the user's attitude on the quality of care that is getting the program;
- Equity - evaluates the degree to which the benefits of a program are being distributed fairly and consistent with the needs of the user.
The application of these criteria requires specific forms of operation, as are indirect measures that should be calculated from the identification and quantification of results.
In general, it is referred to that other category of measures of indicators. There are also a variety of ways to define and use this measure, depending on the area and the purpose of evaluation.
The output indicators reflect the level of satisfaction of basic needs that the program met. They are also called indicators of living standards.
The input indicators refer to the means (resources) available to achieve a certain standard of living. The evaluation of the performance of a program requires setting standards of reference for judging the performance. They could be: absolute, targets set by programs that are considered the standard to be achieved and the deviations should be recorded and analyzed.
A methodology for evaluating social programs involves, then, the choice of criteria and the use of a range of indicators (or other forms of measurement) consistent with the criteria chosen and that would allow a examination on the continued and effective performance of a program or set of programs, by comparison with the previously established standards of performance.
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