Francisca is passionate, dedicated and committed to promote ImihigoYacu Agenda. She is fascinated to talk about “Imihigo approach” also known as Performance Contracts.
Imihigo is a unique, cultural and practical performance management system designed and adopted by Rwandans. His Excellence the president of Rwanda Paul Kagame is at the fore front of Imihigo that set high level accountability requirements on evidence based performance with tangible and sustained results in all public institutions.
Imihigo framework is one of the successful and outstanding methodologies that has demonstrably and effectively supported alignment of national priorities to local priorities and has increased well informed planning through citizen participation from the village level to district level. In Rwanda, Imihigo is seen as an active instrument for enhancing organizational and individual performance targets for achieving desired results. Since the adoption of the imihigo model, the approach has promoted result based culture and hard working in the development process of Rwanda and improved governance. A sense of policy ownership and responsibility among institutions and individuals contracts between government and institutions has been created. We have seen increased culture of creative development, positive competition among institutions and setting of ambitious goals which has contributed to the development of the country in one way or the other. Further, the concept introduced a focus led intervention instead of open activity commonly visible in government institutions with reference from previous fiscal years. Increased efficiency of public resources and minimising duplication of efforts in service delivery has been reported based on strong linkages created across planning and coordination levels. Last but not least, Imihigo performance system has set the ground on which long-term perspective of institutional learning, problem solving and policy decision making.
While there is growing interest in improving evidence based performance in public institutions in Rwanda, several gaps remain. There has been limited evaluation outputs on policy and national programmes. we have seen monitoring as the dominant orientation of M&E practice in Rwanda but programme evaluation is still limited. This however doesn't imply that periodic official statistics, performance reviews and evaluation of some programmes haven't been done but rather, the notes wish to recognize the importance of evaluation as a channel of evidence for government and donor demands to support improvement in planning and service delivery. clearly, there is need to invest more in individual capacities and institutional M&E systems and tools for better results.
To respond to these constraints, the government has put in place complementary approaches in support of realising imihigo goals. These include institutionalization of the result based performance management policy for public service, performance based budgeting, alignment of sector wide approaches to national goals and the drive for good governance, a strong catalyst of development in Rwanda.
Francisca Mujawase, fmujawase@gmail.com
