Capacity Building for the Monitoring and Evaluation of Peacebuilding Interventions in Africa: A Comparative Case Study of DataSystems, Indicators and Institutional Capacity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68050/JAMS.2026.576Keywords:
Africa, Capacity Building, Conflict, Interventions, Monitoring and Evaluation, Peacebuilding, Sustainable Development.Abstract
Peacebuilding in Africa increasingly depends on producing and using data, yet local actors' capacity to design indicators, manage data, and act on findings is uneven and often unmeasured. This article assesses monitoring and evaluation (M&E) capacity in five peacebuilding initiatives across Central, East, North, Southern and West Africa and derives a framework for strengthening it. A multiple-case, document-based design was used. Public programme, institutional and scholarly sources for each initiative were coded against six capacity dimensions (technical expertise; baselines and indicators; data management; standardisation and interoperability; resources and institutional support; feedback and evidence uptake) derived from theory-ofchange logic and the policy-capacity framework of Wu, Ramesh and Howlett (2015). A four-level evidence scale was applied, and counts are descriptive. Document inclusion criteria, coding decision rules and operational definitions of the evidence scale are specified, and each gap is further classified by its principal source. The study found that constraints in resources and institutional support were evident in all five cases; weaknesses in technical expertise, standardisation and interoperability, and feedback and uptake were evident in three cases each; and weaknesses in baselines and indicators and in data management were evident in two cases. Strengths were also evident, notably digital baseline surveying in Mbizana and a predefined indicator system in the ECOWAS early-warning network. The gaps lay less in tools than in the arrangements that
connect data to decisions. Only four of the 18 gaps rested mainly on technical skills; the rest arose from resource, procedural, institutional or political constraints. A five-step, locally owned capacity-building cycle (assess, co-design, institutionalise, measure, and feedback) is proposed and operationalised with responsible actors, expected outputs and measurable progress indicators. The findings are indicative: the sample is small, the sources are secondary, the initiatives are heterogeneous, and the design cannot establish causal links
between particular gaps and peacebuilding outcomes.
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