Prime Minister Anastase Murekezi addressing parliament recently in Kigali – responding to accusations of poor planning which often times resulted in loss taxpayer money. The new World Bank funding will help government improve planning processes
Kigali -The Government of Rwanda and World Bank Group today signed two credit agreements totaling $200 million to help boost the country’s public financial management and support agriculture sector transformation.
With the funding of US $100million, the Transformation of Agriculture Sector Program (Phase 3) will support the Government of Rwanda’s strategic objectives to transform Rwanda’s agriculture. The program will focus on raising famer’s income through diversification of crops, better use of input to combat land erosion, improving irrigation, and increased private sector investments.
The Public Financial Management and Statistics Systems program, with a similar funding, will boost the government’s statistical capacity to make evidence-based policy decisions and improve its planning and budgeting. This will contribute to more efficient and effective use of public resources. It will focus on accounting, auditing, budgeting and reporting in both national and subnational governmental institutions.
“Public Financial Management and agricultural transformation are central to Government’s development plans. It’s crucial that we are able to make evidence based policies that will in turn have a positive impact on our people,” said Claver Gatete, the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning.
Carolyn Turk, World Bank Country Manager for Rwanda for her part said: “One of the innovative features of this Program is that it includes gender-responsive budgeting, with training for planning and budget officers to generate national and subnational gender statistics”.
Both programs will utilize the Program for Results (PforR) financing instrument in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government expenditure programs and help build institutions and capacity under the programs being supported.
PforR is one of the three financing instruments in a four year Country Partnership Strategy that was signed between Rwanda and the World Bank. Others include Development Policy Objective DPO-Sector budget support and Project Modality Support.