President Paul Kagame on Monday, 28 September tasked youth in Rwanda, to lead the way in uprooting poor service delivery in the country.

Although the President’s message was largely targeted at youth members of the Rwanda Patriotic front who he was addressing during the party’s extended National Executive Committee (NEC), the message resonates for every Rwandan in the country.

Good service delivery is an important ingredient in the country’s development effort due to many factors that include attracting investments.

The Government and private sector has in the past held campaigns to promote quality service delivery through customer care drives like ‘Na Yombi’ and ‘Noza Serivisi’.

While such awareness campaigns have led to some improvement in service delivery, more needs to be done like calling out institutions and persons who give bad service and like the President mentioned, people should not keep quiet when they get bad service.

Also to improve service delivery in the country, the government which provides most of the services in the country should set up ways to punish institutions and persons who give bad service.

In 2010, the Rwanda Governance Board (RGB) started carrying out periodic surveys to collect citizen’s feedback and assessment of the various services provided by government institutions.

The survey which is contained in the ‘Citizen Report Card’ (CRC), is a tool for quality assurance and evaluation of whether service providers are fulfilling the commitments in their service charters.

The latest survey that was released by the Rwanda Governance Board in 2018 showed a satisfactory level of good service delivery in Kigali city districts however other districts performed poorly.

Although RGB at the time threatened to sanction public and private institutions which fail to provide good services to the public, nothing has been done since then.

As Rwanda continues to position itself as the ideal destination for conference tourism, service delivery which is a key component for tourism needs to get better.

Furthermore, since the service sector contributes 40 per cent to the national economy, it is crucial that every service provider plays their role in giving better services.