LAHORE: Punjab Finance Minister Dr Ayesha Ghaus Pasha said on Wednesday monitoring and evaluation have a strategic role to play in policy making with the aim to improve relevance, efficiency and effectiveness of policy reforms.

Major pillars of the Punjab Government Growth Strategy 2018 to make the province secure, economically vibrant, industrialised and knowledge-based province needed to be supported by an efficient and effective monitoring and evaluation system towards evi-dence-based policy formulation, she said.

The minister was addressing a conference titled `Role of Monitoring and Evaluation in Evidence Based Policy Making` organised by the Punjab Planning and Development Department`s Monitoring and Evaluation Directorate General in collaboration with Unicef, the United Nations children`s agency.

Dr Ayesha said Punjab`s development priorities were fully aligned with those of the federal government, and the Punjab Growth Strategy 2018 and federal government`s Vision 2025 were an outcome of the same strategically evidence-based approach also underpinned by Punjab`sMedium Term Development Framework (MTDF) 2014-18.

She said the conference would benefit target groups to promote use of evidence derived from evaluations to improve government working, its impact on citizens and contribution towards eradication of challenges faced by us.

Punjab P&D Chairman Muhammad Jahanzaib Khan said the concept of `evidence-based policy making` had been gaining vital importance in recent years.

Evidence-based policy could be defined as an approach that helped people make well-informed decisions about policies, programmesand projects by putting the best available evidence at the heart of policy development and implementation, he added.

Earlier, P&D Director General (Monitoring and Evaluation), Dr Sajjad Mubin, in his welcome address, said evaluations and their findings were extremely important in a country where there were resource constraints and everexpanding needs and demands for services and social benefits of all types.

P&D Balochistan Secretary Zulfiqar Durrani and Unicef Pakistan representative Rahama Rihood Mohammad also spoke on the occasion.