Organization: Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) 
Project: PMG Training Manual
Country: South Africa
Government Level: National

Overview:  

PMG’s Training Manual for Monitors is a comprehensive guide for its part-time monitors, full-time interns and international volunteers who assist PMG to monitor the South African Parliament’s Committee meetings. The training manual helps to prepare monitors to attend Committee meetings, write up reports of the proceedings, and provide electronic copies of all Committee documents. The work of monitors is to produce objective, accurate reports within 24 to 36 hours of each Committee meeting.

Background:

The Parliamentary Monitoring Group, an information service, was established in 1995 as a partnership between Black Sash, Human Rights Committee, and Idasa with the aim of providing a digest of the proceedings of the more than fifty South African Parliamentary Committees. PMG became a fully fledged independent non-governmental organization in July 2009.

Parliament keeps a record of all its plenary sessions by means of the Hansard, a verbatim transcript of the proceedings. However, Parliament has not set up such a system to record its Committee meetings, making it extremely difficult for organisations to keep up with developments. Parliament currently has over 50 Committees, which are constitutionally mandated to hold meetings in the open. The public may be excluded from attending only if  “it is reasonable and justifiable to do so in an open and democratic society” (S59 and S72 of the Constitution). The lack of an accessible record of the work of the Parliamentary Committees is a shortcoming as it affects the accountability of Members of Parliament, detracts from the efficiency of Committees and makes public interventions more difficult.

Parliamentary monitoring is an extremely demanding job integrating subject awareness, writing skills, listening skills and decision-making in terms of what to include in the report. If necessary, monitors may have to talk to Members of Parliament and government officials in order to confirm the accuracy of their notes. The Training Manual was developed to provide clear and concise directions to monitors on how to best address these challenges.

The monitors’ reports are made available through the PMG website (www.pmg.org.za), which was set up in 1998 to disseminate detailed meeting reports and supporting documentation from Parliamentary Committees to a wide audience, which includes the general public, government institutions, and even MPs. All commercial organisations, government departments, and the media must pay a subscription fee to access 15 of the 50 committees which are closed access. Subscription by these entities helps to subsidize civil society’s access to PMG for whom the service is free.

Beyond the reporting of Committee proceedings, PMG provides:

• Early notification of requests for submissions
• Details of public hearings
• Committee and parliamentary programmes
• Legislative programmes for each department
• A weekly progress report of the status of each bill in the legislative process
• A monthly newsletter about what was discussed in Parliament of relevance to communities (emailed and posted)

Implementation:

PMG recruits ordinary citizens from all walks of life and all ages to serve as monitors. PMG advertises usually four times a year at the beginning of each parliamentary session via one or more newspapers, by placing advertisement flyers at universities and via invitations to apply on its website.

PMG sometimes has university internships running with the faculties of three local universities at the master degree level for Political Studies students. Additionally,PMG offers three to four full-time developmental internships to young graduates annually. For these interns, the internship offers valuable practical experience in governance. The internship programme serves to bridge the gap between getting a degree and obtaining employment. PMG also welcomes international volunteers, including those completing “study abroad” programmes. 

Applicants are assessed by completing a written exercise at home. PMG sends them a link to a 45 minute extract from an audio recording of a committee meeting. They then write a detailed summary of the meeting, which helps PMG to assess how accurate a potential monitor is.

PMG does not run a monitor training workshop. Rather, they email each prospective monitor the Training Manual. Once these new monitors have reviewed the Training Manual, they meet with PMG for a short briefing session and then attend a parliamentary committee meeting with an experienced monitor for a trial run. If both the monitor and PMG believe the monitor is ready, he/she may start attending and monitoring committee meetings alone.

From this stage, the PMG editors review and provide regular written feedback to each new monitor so as to prevent them from repeating the same errors and to improve accuracy.  PMG editors also utilize a guideline or stylebook to standardize their work. 

At the end of each parliamentary session, PMG asks its editors to report any concerns about the work of the monitors.PMG then reaches out to all monitors at the start of the next parliamentary session, to provide feedback and improve their performance. Even then, it is a challenge to for some monitors to achieve the level of meticulousness that PMG expects.

Achievements:

The Monitor Training Manual reduces the resource burden of running frequent training workshops. By using a written exercise screening for would-be monitors, and the Training Manual for those who join the organization, PMG staff can focus on editing/personalised feedback on each monitoring report, as well as broader PMG activities. 

The Training Manual has helped PMG retain consistent quality reporting despite a significant turnover of monitors.Through its training program, PMG has trained over 700 monitors. Some of these monitors have gone on to positions in broader governance work, such as: 

• Parliamentary Committee Secretaries
• State law advisors
• Researchers in advocacy organisations
• Diplomatic officers
• Political party researchers
• Parliamentary Liaison Officer for government departments

This work has led to significant success in terms of citizen and parliamentary engagement. During the past year from December 2012 - November 2013, the PMG website has had a monthly average of 105,000 pageviews and 42,000 unique visitors.

Critical Issues:

Subscription Fees: One early point of contention was when PMG introduced a subscription fee for all government users in 2011. While Members of Parliament have free access via their political party, it took much lobbying by PMG and parliamentary staff to obtain a broader subscription from the Parliament. 

Turnover: PMG experiences significant turnover of monitors, largely due to long parliamentary recesses and constituency periods throughout the year. This mean that four times a year, there are lengthy breaks where part-time monitors are without income. Even if the monitors enjoy the monitoring work, they are forced to seek more consistent employment if PMG is their sole source of income.

Irregular Committee Meetings: The committee meetings are not spread out evenly throughout the week. Most of the committee meetings take place on only two days of the week, that is, 20 meetings on Tuesday and 20 meetings on Wednesday. This means PMG must maintain a large cohort of monitors to cover the overlapping meetings, while monitors have no work at other times. 

The latter two points mentioned above have been constant stumbling blocks for PMG, as they prevent the development of expert monitors dedicated to specific committees. The large turnover undermines the quality of PMG monitoring. One attempt to improve quality, taken in 2007, was for PMG to institute a practice of releasing the digital audio recording of each meeting to the public. PMG Committee Reports are still valued for their summaries, but they benefit from improved accuracy. 

Contacts: 

Gaile Fullard, Executive Director: [email protected]
Rashaad Alli, Monitor and Projects Manager: [email protected]

Additional Resources: 

Getting Information to the People: The Role of the Parliamentary Monitoring Group

PMG is on Twitter and Facebook. 

Note: This post is part eight in a series of case studies on tools PMOs have used that can be replicated or serve as models for organizations in different contexts. To see all of the case studies, click here. To contribute a case study on a project that your organization has created, please fill out the template or email Dustin Palmer at [email protected].