NITI Aayog and ISPP come together to strengthen policy ecosystem in India

New Delhi: In order to build a collaboration for faster intermediation of knowledge and use within the public system, government’s policy think tank NITI Aayog’s Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO) signed a Statement of Intent (S0I) with Indian School of Public Policy (ISPP).

Dr. Sekhar Bonu, Director General of DMEO and Dr Parth J Shah, Co-founder and Director of ISPP signed the SoI. Alok Mishra, Director (DMEO), Priyanka Sethi, Deputy Director (DMEO), Luis Miranda, Co-founder and Chairman (ISPP), Dr. Shubhashis Gangopadhyay, Dean (ISPP) and Ram Kamesh JV, Head of Partnerships and Strategic Alliance (ISPP) were among other dignitaries present on this occasion.

Together, DMEO and ISPP will work towards engaging, training, mentoring and capacity building of government officials as well as public policy scholars. For this both parties will work broadly in three main areas i.e Technical Assistance, Capacity Building and Communication and Outreach.

While virtually signing the SoI, Dr. Sekhar Bonu, Director General of DMEO said, " DMEO aims to develop the monitoring and evaluation ecosystem in the country. We are delighted about this partnership with ISPP, which is aimed at collaboration in capacity building and joint research, as a step towards realising our broader goal."

Dr. Shubhashis Gangopadhyay, Dean of ISPP said, ‘Given the type of work that DMEO is doing, ISPP would like to bring the faculty together to deep dive as required to ensure qualitative knowledge is being generated and used within the public system’.

Dr Parth J Shah, Director of ISPP, elaborated that Under Technical Assistance, both parties shall engage in knowledge exchange, joint research studies, impact evaluations, rapid assessments as required based on the sectoral, technological, methodological and/or survey-related expertise of ISPP. Under Capacity Building, activities will be conducted to strengthen the capacity of regional institutions/local researchers in the area of monitoring and evaluation of development programmes, leveraging expert domain areas of ISPP, which are Health, Urban Governance, Education, Technology, Environment, Gender, National Security & Regulation.

While under Communications and Outreach, evidence building exercises, organising joint conferences and podcast series will be conducted wherein ISPP scholars will interact and interview the DMEO and NITI Aayog’s experts on current policy issues, evaluations and perspectives.

Other areas such as Live projects for ISPP scholars, internships, exchange of experts between DMEO and ISPP will also be explored.