Established 2013 · South Africa
Colnag International advises governments, development partners, regulators and boards on whether public money is working, and on what to change when it is not. Thirteen years, five core markets, two continents.
§ 01Position
Most of our mandates are competitively procured, several through national evaluator and advisory panels. A number are not published at all.
Colnag International was founded in 2013 in South Africa. The work that started the firm was an implementation evaluation of a national incentive, the kind of assignment where a department has already spent the money and needs to know, credibly and on the record, what it bought.
That has stayed the centre of the practice. We evaluate programmes that are already running. We review what governments spend and model what it should cost. We investigate when boards and regulators need findings that will hold up. And we help build the systems, from revenue platforms and payment rails to identity registers and monitoring frameworks, that produce the evidence in the first place.
In 2014 the practice crossed out of Africa into the Middle East, and it has run on both continents ever since. The method travels. The teams are local.
§ 02Practices
Teams are assembled per mandate and draw across practices. Nothing here is sold as a product.
We evaluate programmes that are already running, and more than once we have evaluated the national systems that are meant to evaluate everything else.
What a public service actually costs, what it is currently being charged, and what the budget process would have to change for those two numbers to meet.
Sector strategy where somebody has to sign a transaction at the end of it, including the transactions that close an entity down.
Investigations mandated by boards and regulators, run so that the findings survive lawyers, auditors and, when it comes to it, a commission of inquiry.
The platforms that produce public evidence in the first place: revenue, identity, payments, and the monitoring systems hung off them.
Climate commitments are increasingly fiscal commitments. We work where the two meet: in taxonomies, in budgets, and in independent evaluation.
§ 03Record
An anonymised extract from thirteen years of work. Client names, report contents and team compositions stay confidential. We release them on request, with the client’s consent.
Filter the full archive by market, practice and period.
A decade-long programme of expenditure and performance reviews with cost modelling and options appraisal. Subjects included state information technology services and their pricing, policing fleet management, and the costing and funding of post-school education and training.
A whole-of-government review of roughly R50 billion a year of business incentives: what they cost, who received them, whether they overlapped, and whether the portfolio held together as a policy rather than as an accumulation.
A six-year evaluation platform. Seventeen evaluations and a national general population survey were delivered through a local partner structure, alongside monitoring support to the agency's wider portfolio.
Replacement of the legacy revenue platform with an integrated system covering registration, filing, payment and audit case management. The new system went live in January 2019.
A forensic audit of government expenditure and transactions. The appointment followed negotiation on the basis of specialist data analytics capability.
The 2016 baseline assessment and its 2021 repeat, allowing five years of public financial management performance to be compared on an identical framework. Final report on the second assessment delivered in 2022.
§ 04Markets
We do not open an office to win a tender. Every market below carries more than one mandate and, in most, more than one decade of relationships.
2012 · headquarters
Where the firm began, and where the deepest institutional relationships sit. National evaluation, a decade-long treasury spending review programme, a whole-of-government incentive review, and the forensic mandates that arrive when a board has run out of options.
Since 2013
Thirteen years of public finance and institutional work: budget support technical assistance across three operations, replacement of the national revenue platform, partnership transaction advisory, and a growing body of climate and social policy mandates.
Since 2013
European Union sector programmes anchored the practice here, covering human resource development, vocational training and policy dialogue, alongside revenue technology, biodiversity budgeting, climate commitments and, most recently, government forensic work.
Tell us which record number interests you and what you are trying to decide. We will come back with what we can share, covering scope, method, team and references, and say plainly where a confidentiality undertaking stops us.
