Despite making major strides in the last 20 years of its decentralisation journey, Rwanda still has a long way to go, experts noted Wednesday, citing "various” studies.

This was during a one-day session held in Kigali to contribute to the body of knowledge in advancing the thinking and the future perspectives of the country’s decentralisation policy.

Bob Gakire, the Director General of the Directorate of Territorial Administration and Good Governance in the Ministry of Local Government, said among the key challenges include fiscal and financial decentralisation gaps, structure constraints and capacity constraints.

Others include issues centred on streamlining sectoral decentralisation as well as poverty and social vulnerability.

The inability to maximise local governments’ own revenue potentialities, review of local government taxes and fees base, and review of the central government transfers allocation formula have continued to undermine the country’s efforts towards decentralisation, Gakire added.

Specifically, the central government and local government structures are designed in such a way that they create some imbalances in the allocation of functions and resources, including human resources, he explained.

Lower administrative entities, especially the cells, also have small staff compared to the responsibilities or demands they have and they are increasingly handling more responsibilities that include demands for service delivery, data collection and resolution of conflicts among others.

When it comes to streamlining sectoral decentralisation, there is an ineffective coordination framework to foster strategic linkages and leverage political will to fast track political decentralization and strengthen inter-governmental relations.

Another challenge is that the local government and decentralised service delivery system face institutional and human resource constraints, "which undermine the effectiveness of decentralization.”

According to Geoffrey Mushaija, the Executive Secretary of Northern Province, who has been working in local government since 2006, moving forward, local government entities need to be given their own budget "and let them decide what to do [with it] based on their costing and priorities.”

"I think that we need to re-think how we differentiate things; central participation and the local responsibilities, to avoid duplication. Sometimes you look at some of the functions like procurement, staffing, costing, and others, done centrally, yet the implementation is done at the district levels.

Mushaija also noted that progress has been registered in the past 20 years "but we need to look at how basic infrastructure like the internet that supports the decentralized functions” help deliver expectations.

‘Nobody wants to give away powers’

Among other things, Noël Ntahobari, a researcher and policy analyst, said a practice shift is needed urgently in order for local entities to be on top of things.

"When you go to the ground now you realise that implementation of, for instance, agricultural services such as extension services remain predominantly centrally driven by the Ministry and affiliated agencies yet a local government that enjoys proximity with the population and interacts on a daily basis is there. There is a problem there,” he said.

"We need to urgently shift this kind of practice and I am very much aware that it won’t be an easy path to follow, because nobody wants to give away powers – because if I transfer all the money and staff, how do I keep local government under tight control?”