Published On: 2013-09-14

Kigali, Sept 14, 2013  – The average performance of all Districts across Rwanda under the contracts signed with the President of the country to meet the targets set in the areas of economic and social development, governance and justice has improved tremendously.The Office of the President in collaboration with the Ministry of Local Government released the outcome of the 2012-2013 fiscal year performance contracts evaluation on Friday. It also signed the performance contracts with District Mayors for the fiscal year 2013-2014. Revealing the results of the evaluation of the districts performance contracts, Minister of Local Government James Musoni said here on Thursday that he appreciated the level of achievements that all Districts showcased and stressed the need to maintain the momentum in this journey of self-reliance.

“The average performance is tremendously increasing while the margin between the first and the last districts has been narrowing every successive year,” he said.  Minister Musoni’s observations followed a three-week-long performance evaluation that was carried out in all districts countrywide from 16 July to 10 August 2013, conducted by a National Team comprising senior officials and experts from different sectorial ministries, public agencies, the civil society platform and the private sector. Nonetheless, this year’s evaluation had a supervisory team consisting of Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Local Government, Senior Officials from the offices of the President and Prime Minister who were monitoring and ensuring efficiency of the ‘imihigo’ evaluation exercise.

“The Imihigo program and its annual evaluations findings have promoted the spirit of competitiveness in Local Economic Development; identifying challenges that impede implementation of government priorities and contributes to identifying solutions for fast-tracking socio-economic development whereas identifying best practices”, Minister Musoni said. Outlining the way forward for local governments to keep the development path towards self-reliance, he said: “District leaders should maintain the course in improving their planning, coordination, Monitoring and Evaluation and support to lower entities. As we are signing Imihigo for the new fiscal year, local governments understand that, all institutions concerned (both at central and local level) shall consider the challenges observed and address them in the forthcoming planning and budgeting processes.” “Central Government’s support to Districts remains vital, especially on some challenges where districts capacities are too low compared to the need

 Now that Imihigo have been institutionalized in central and local governments, we should all join our efforts and have them institutionalized at village and household levels”, Minister Musoni asserted. The just concluded districts performance contracts established the following key highlights; Increased access to both electricity and clean water; increased kilometers of public street lights; more efforts put in constructing feeder and tarmac roads; construction of classrooms and teachers’ hostels with citizens’ contribution, 1,739 classrooms and 416 teachers’ hostels were constructed in all districts. Besides set imihigo, evaluators assessed how other cross cutting national priorities are performing e.g. reinstating properties for genocide survivors, use of alternative energy sources among the few and key development challenges encountered by Local Governments. The total number of activities evaluated was 1846, clustered in pillars of economic development (927); Social Development (381); Governance and Justice (538). The general performance was very impressive in all pillars. The Ministry of Local Government will soon get an opportunity to elaborate further in the course of the next week and thereafter. For More Information -  Ministry of Local Government,

Rwanda Emmanuel Mugisha

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