Abstract
The literature has robust contestation about the origin of public policy, programme and project monitoring and
evaluation (M&E). Cloete (2016) argues that public policy, programme and project M&E originated in Europe and America
and was introduced in Africa by colonisers who divided the African continent among themselves in the early 1880s. Cloete
(2016) does not explain why there was no public policy, programme or project M&E in Africa or any other non-western
part of the world before the arrival of western colonisers. Mouton (2010) also argues that M&E was introduced in Africa
by international development organisations and financial organisations in the 1980s. According to Mouton (2010), these
western development organisations and financial institutions introduced M&E to the African continent as a condition for
accessing foreign aid and as a funding requirement for the projects these institutions were funding. Neither Mouton
(2010) nor Cloete (2016) accounts for ample literature which demonstrates that M&E practices existed in Africa (and in
China) thousands of years before the arrival of the international development organisation and international financial
organisations in these parts of the world. This paper uses the Secondary Data Analysis (Archival Study) approach to
provide a systematic and chronological analysis of the available literature to trace the genesis of public policy, programme
and project M&E as a practice. The findings in this paper indicate that M&E could potentially have become a practice in
African countries such as Egypt and Asian countries such as China long before it was a practice in the U.S. and European
countries. However, evidence suggests that academics and practitioners in the U.S. and European countries could have
compiled the first recorded theoretical academic content about M&E models and approaches currently being used to
train people who want to take up a career or profession in M&E.