An in­crease in ex­ports and a re­duc­tion in pover­ty were among the achieve­ments high­light­ed when the Min­istry of Plan­ning and Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment rolled out the first ever Gov­ern­ment per­for­mance ap­praisal re­port in T&T on Mon­i­tor­ing and Eval­u­a­tion (M&E).

In de­liv­er­ing the per­for­mance re­port, Plan­ning Min­is­ter Dr Bhoen­dra­datt Tewarie not­ed that the Medi­um Term Pol­i­cy Frame­work (MTPF) de­lin­eates gov­ern­ment's five pri­or­i­ty ar­eas that will sup­port im­prove­ment in the qual­i­ty of lives of cit­i­zens. These ar­eas in­clude:

�2 Crime and Law and Or­der

�2 Agri­cul­ture and Food Se­cu­ri­ty

�2 Health Care Ser­vices and Hos­pi­tals

�2 Eco­nom­ic Growth, Job Cre­ation, Com­pet­i­tive­ness and In­no­va­tion

�2 Pover­ty Re­duc­tion and Hu­man Cap­i­tal De­vel­op­ment

Dr Tewarie said the per­for­mance frame­work is an im­por­tant step in in­sti­tu­tion­al­is­ing a re­sults based mon­i­tor­ing and eval­u­a­tion sys­tem in the pub­lic sec­tor as it pro­vides a fo­cus on what to mea­sure.

He said the Gov­ern­ment's top pri­or­i­ties are in align­ment with the needs of so­ci­ety, adding that the "Part­ner­ship Ad­min­is­tra­tion is work­ing as­sid­u­ous­ly to en­sure that de­vel­op­ment is achieved on a na­tion­al lev­el."

The An­nu­al Re­port on per­for­mance ar­tic­u­lates sev­en key re­sult ar­eas, which are trans­lat­ed in­to 23 spe­cif­ic na­tion­al out­comes. Progress to­wards the out­comes will be mea­sured us­ing 45 per­for­mance in­di­ca­tors.

Iindi­ca­tors in the pri­or­i­ty area of crime and law and or­der are crime rate, re­cidi­vism rate and homi­cide de­tec­tion rate.The tar­get for crime is to be re­duced by 25 per cent in 2014 and the re­cidi­vism rate by ten per cent per an­num with a 25 per cent in­crease in the de­tec­tion rate by 2014.

Dr Tewarie not­ed a small de­crease in the crime de­tec­tion rate from 16.8 per cent in 2010 to 14.8 per cent in 2012.There was al­so a de­crease in homi­cide de­tec­tion rate by a sig­nif­i­cant 9.4 per cent to 15.4 per cent in 2012 from 24.8 per cent in 2010.

There was an in­crease in ex­ports from US$9,314.9 mil­lion in 2010 to US$10,919.3 mil­lion in 2012. A marked in­crease was al­so recog­nised in non-en­er­gy re­sources from US$1 924.0 in 2010 to US $2,095.9 in 2012.

A re­duc­tion in pover­ty was record­ed from 18.9 per cent in 2009 to 14.8 per cent in 2012.Dr Tewarie at­trib­uted this to sound eco­nom­ic man­age­ment and pru­dent fi­nan­cial ac­count­ing.

Di­rec­tor of the Na­tion­al Trans­for­ma­tion Unit of the Min­istry of Plan­ning and Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment, Di­nesh Ra­goo spear­head­ed and cham­pi­oned the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the Re­sults-Based Man­age­ment.