Good Practices and Innovations in Public Governance 2003-2011

Good Practices and InnovATIONS in Public Governance
• Supporting citizens in each village with a maximum of €1,000 to act on problems
identified during the PPA process. For the first time, PPA’s moved from
being extractive information gathering processes to something citizens felt
they could act on themselves. Over 10,000 village actions emerged. (Resources
provided by EU, process facilitated by community facilitators), (15,000 actions
planned for 2007-2008);
• Developing financial systems to transfer funds from the central government
directly to the citizens’ accounts at the local level without any intermediaries
in between and with low transaction costs;
• Repeating cycles of collective action at the local village level before scaling up
to sectoral and district levels to provide public goods on a larger scale, driven,
designed and owned by citizens; and
• Using information generated in social maps to hold various national government
departments to account and use social maps as a basis for developing alternative
citizen driven national statistical system (Ministry of Local Government).
Several independent audits and studies have consistently demonstrated that Ubudehe has
achieved high value for money by ensuring resources go directly to citizens and contributed
to increased citizenship and democratization in Rwanda. But most importantly,
across all villages in Rwanda Ubudehe is known, and citizens have actively engaged in
one way or another in problem defining and solving processes. The Ubudehe programme
has promoted: self-governance and poverty reduction; services that respond to citizens’
needs; the development of a formal economy, and trust, tolerance and community spirit.
While the Ubudehe initiative is still ongoing, it has achieved several milestones. One
of them is the fact that Ubudehe has transformed the nature of Participatory Poverty
Assessments (PPAs), moving away from traditional approaches to ones where citizens
are truly in control. The use of social maps has begun to transform and influence
new thinking in Rwanda about how national statistical systems can shift away from
survey based methodologies to ones that are controlled by citizens and thereby capture
citizens’ voice and preferences regularly. By 2007 citizens in all villages had
actively participated in generating social maps and defining and stating their preferences
and priority problems. The information generated from social maps is now
being used to act as performance measures to hold national government and relevant
ministries accountable against commitments made.
The second major achievement is the fact that citizens not only captured and stated their
preferences and characteristics of poverty, but had the opportunity to come together
through collective action to do something about priority problems they had stated. In
2006-2007, across 9,000 villages, citizens came together to solve the problems they had
highlighted (from restocking livestock lost during the genocide, to provision of public
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