Rwanda—Public Sector Reform Technical Assistance Facility (TAF)

The Rwanda Technical Assistance Facility (TAF) is a component of the Strengthening Public Financial Management and Revenue Collection (SPARC) program, which aims to support the Government of Rwanda on a range of priorities across the public sector policy-making agenda.

The TAF is supporting the government of Rwanda in delivering the National Strategy for Transformation (NST1) through the provision of short and long-term technical expertise to strengthen the quality and inclusivity of the policy-making process as critical to achieving a more effective policy response to complex development problems. This flexible and responsive facility provides technical expertise and capacity building to government ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs) in policy development and implementation, feedback mechanisms, performance contracts, and cross-government coordination, among others.

Sample Activities

• Support an improved enabling environment for private sector-led growth through advisory support to the Ministry of Trade and Industry on feedback mechanisms and evidence-based problem-solving.
• Promote more effective citizen and business participation in local government policy-making through support to the Joint Action Development Forum and the Rwanda Governance Board.
• Promote stronger public sector accountability through reform of the Imihigo system, ensuring local communities play a greater role in transparent decision-making, and shifting focus towards outcome targets and improvements to the system of change.
• Support integration of gender equality into the Imihigo planning, budgeting, and evaluation systems through advisory support to the Gender Monitoring Office.

Select Results

• Supported the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda in the development of an Imihigo (“performance contracts”) impact evaluation methodology to help understand the causal factors that have contributed to district development and offer insights and recommendations that ensure district imihigo contribute to more effective policies and strategies for sustainable development.
• Supported the Rwanda Governance Board by facilitating the Joint Action Development Forum (JADF) engagement meetings with citizens’ representatives and non-state actors, which led to recommendations to revise the Prime Minister’s instructions on JADF.
• Contributed to the midterm review of the District Development Strategies (DDS) in the Eastern Province via the JADF meetings, providing a set of feedback and resolutions collected from the various consultations with non-state actors. This led to recommendations being incorporated into the DDS of three districts (Gatsibo, Kayonza, and Rwamagana), which were then submitted to the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning for technical guidance in alignment with NST1.
• Supported the Gender Monitoring Office with community dialogues on gender accountability in the Southern Province. The dialogues resulted in a commitment by all eight districts to incorporate gender-responsive indicators in their Imihigo and DDS.
• Provided capacity-building support to 32 MDA staff. A further 2,000+ people from districts and provincial administration, as well as wider JADF members and civil society organizations, benefited from TAF-supported capacity-strengthening activities.
• Supported the strengthening of two platforms to ensure that policymakers continue to engage key stakeholders (citizens, the private sector, and other non-state actors) in policy improvement. The two platforms used—JADF and community dialogues—engaged 241 stakeholders.
• Supported the organization of 16 public engagement forums (4 planned), with 67 percent (15 percent planned) of which involved non-state actor participants.