Prime Minister Anastase Murekezi has said that government is committed to empower public servants at the grassroots level to ensure better service delivery.

The Premier made the remarks, yesterday, while briefing a joint session of Senators and Members of the Lower House on the status of management of public servants. The MPs had raised concerns over the need to do more to empower public servants at the grassroots level, especially at cell and village level to ensure better service delivery.

Murekezi said government will continue streamlining the decentralisation agenda which has done quite a lot in empowering all public servants.

"We will continue to fill those gaps to better public service,” Murekezi said.

Earlier, MP Marie Mediatrice Izabiriza observed that there has been an increase in human resource in all districts at all levels, recently, and not at the grassroots level, yet, the latter does much of the decentralised governance work.

Izabiriza noted that Rwanda Governance Scorecard would rise if the government empowers grassroots leadership by increasing staff and salary structures. The Rwanda Governance Scorecard 2015 rated public service delivery at 67.7 percent. However, the government’s target is to raise the bar to 85 percent by 2018.

Izabiriza’s comments were echoed by MP Thacienne Mukandamage, who said that governance is indeed in form of a pyramid, which leaves a lot of work at grassroots level.

"Cells and village levels play a big role in coordinating activities and consolidating reports relating to community development programmes such as "Metuelle de Sante” and Vision Umurenge Programme (VUP).

"They (grassroots) do a lot in reporting to Sector levels and so they surely need empowerment in terms of human resource and capacity building,” Mukandamage said.

According to the current government deployment structure, a cell has two public servants.

In response, Murekezi noted that the government has always wanted to increase this number but has been limited by lack of resources.

"We wanted to increase the number of public servants at the grassroots (especially at the cell level) but we didn’t find enough budget for this restructuring. But we have embarked on encouraging senior and elite citizens at the grassroots level to help at the grassroots level,” Murekezi said.

In bid to improve public service delivery, Murekezi added that, both local and central governments are required to incorporate service delivery in their performance contracts and this should drastically improve service delivery.

Achieving this, he said, will require all local government civil servants to create a chain from grassroots through the district level for better service delivery.

"The government has put much emphasis on decentralisation…we therefore realise the importance of empowering all public servants through trainings, and revising their salaries through horizontal and vertical promotions,” he said.

MP Mukandamage said empowering grassroots’ public offices will certainly bring about effective planning and seamless streamlining of the central government’s policies in decentralisation.

MP Spéciose Mukandutiye also noted that the introduction of online service delivery gateways (Rwanda online and Irembo), might not yield expected outcomes if grassroots level leaders are not educated on how to use these portals or at least explaining to them the significance of moving from the labor-intensive paperwork to online applications in public service.

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