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Safety and Security Leads in Rwanda Governance ScoreCard 2020

by Daniel Sabiiti
7:48 pm

Officials at the presentation of Rwanda Governance Scorecard 2020

Despite the challenges of Coronavirus Rwandans feel much safer and secure, the 7th edition report of Rwanda Governance Score card (RGS) released by the Rwanda governance Board (RGB) has showed.

The RGS is a quantifiable index that gauges the state of governance in the country and measured on eight pillars, 35 indicators and 136 variables with information indices collected administrative data, perception and expert surveys.

The report published this Friday December 11, 2020 shows the Safety and security continued to lead other pillars in the scorecard with a score of 95.44% in which participation and inclusiveness were the best indicators attaining the highest improvement rate of 8.96%.

This pillar has maintained the lead since the inception of RGS report in 2014, where safety and security moved from 87.26% to above 90% average score over the past six years, with only a slight drop in between 2018- 2019- the same years when Rwandans were under intensive attacks from illegal armed groups based in Burundi and DR Congo.

The Rule of Law ranked 2nd with 87.86%, Fighting corruption, transparency and accountability ranked 3rd with 86.28%, Political Rights and civil liberties ranked 4th with 85.76%, while Participation and inclusiveness ranked 5th with 81.96% among the top five pillars in 2020.

Rwanda Governance Board CEO, Usta Kaitesi said that there has been a general increased performance in all pillars though some of them needed to be improved in order to attain the country’s long term development goals.

For example, the pillar on Investing in human and social capital was the least performing with 73.32% from 68.52% in the previous edition. The report said that improvement was needed in education, social protection, poverty reduction and climate change resilience.

Min. Judith Uwizeye

Other areas which need to be improved include the quality of services which ranked 6th with 78.31%, with an improvement of 7.77% from 70.54% in the previous edition.

Samantha Diouf, vice chairperson of International NGOs in Rwanda (NINGO) and Deputy Country Director at Girl Effect said: “As civil society we will sit with RGB to revisit the report and outline how to address areas which need improvement especially in nutrition and education among others.”

Diouf said that International and local NGOs are ready to support the government by using the report data to guide their implementation of human capital and development next year.

United Nations Rwanda Resident Coordinator, Fode Ndiaye commended government for setting a good example of self-assessment in the framework of African Peer Review Mechanism and acknowledged Rwanda for maintaining regularity and quality of the RGS report especially during this period of Covid-19.

Judith Uwizeye, Minister in Office of the President, who officially launched the report encourage concerned institutions to sustain the gains made in pillar of safety and security but to multiply their efforts in weak pillars to improve the socio-economic situation since all pillars are important indicators in the National Strategy for Transformation (NST1).