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RWANDA
Rwanda

The government of Rwanda views the PRS process as closely linked to the conciliatory process following the civil war and political and financial decentralisation and therefore already designed the preparation of the Interim PRSP as a participatory process.

The Secretariat of the Poverty Reduction National Programme is responsible for the PRS process proper. In addition to ministry officials, two representatives of civil society are on its governing committee. The Participation Task Force designed the participatory process with support from an NGO representative from India.

Since no poverty surveys have been conducted in Rwanda so far, the PRS process was linked up with a Participatory Poverty Assessment. The Ubudehe method applied in this context represents a very grassroots-oriented bottom-up process in the framework of which village communities work out their own strategies. When these plans are evaluated at a higher administrative level, no further topics may be added. Regional development plans based on them have to be handed back to the communities for relevance testing. Members of local NGOs were among those trained in participatory techniques for the interviews.

Consultations were above all held at national and prefecture level. The media were informed, and the draft PRSP was submitted to national and international NGOs with a request for comments.

In the further course of the process, the government directly linked up participation with its strategy to combat poverty. The local government ministry implemented a decentralisation programme at prefecture and community level with the aid of which village communities were instructed in working out their own development strategies.


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In their reviews, academics arrive at the result that the government is making efforts to ensure broad-based participation and attempting to apply lessons learnt in the civil war. However, they point out that the response from NGOs, the private sector and the media is relatively low. Reasons for this are identified as a lack of competence in the fields of advocacy and economic policy. However, it is criticised that the draft PRSP has only been published in English. All in all, from an academic angle, the participatory approach is appraised as grassroots-oriented and attested a model character for other countries in post-conflict phases.

In contrast, NGOs criticise that the government has provided civil society with hardly any information and has almost exclusively integrated international NGOs into the process. They claim that hardly any Rwandan NGO or church organisation had even heard of PRSPs when the Interim PRSP was published. While the government is making a considerable effort to hear the "normal" population, the participation of organised groups has not been enshrined institutionally. Owing to an absence of autonomous civil society groups, there can be no mention of country ownership.

In the Joint Staff Assessment, the IMF and the World Bank stated that they were impressed with the process and ownership.


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Up to date: February 2003
PRSP-Watch © INEF / VENRO, 2003

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