Rwandan civil society project, Public Policy Information, Monitoring and Advocacy (PPIMA), will receive Rwf 4.9bn (US$8.5m) from the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) to enhance the role of citizens and civil society in monitoring and providing feed back to government.

PPIMA is aimed at promoting active participation of the civil society and the citizens in assessing the effectiveness of government policies.

According to Programme manager, Patrick Osodo, the funding will help civil society organizations and the population play an active role in monitoring and providing feed back to the government on how its policies can be more effective.

"The project comes from concerns that conventional methodologies used to capture citizens voices on how government programmes and policies impact them often fail to meet the demands of users at several levels,” said Osodo.

"The quantitative methodologies such as household and health surveys, useful for policy makers at national level, are less useful for ordinary citizens who rarely understand the complex formulas and languages in which they are presented, and therefore unable to use them to understand and influence the impact of development at their levels,” Osodo explained.

He added that qualitative methodologies such as the participatory poverty assessments and community score cards generated by the government to be used by citizens, are considered not reliable enough to give the true picture.

PPIMA project will operate up to 2013 in partnership with Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), Care International and Save the Children fund UK.

The project will first be implemented in the districts of Gatsibo, Gakenke, Ngororero and Nyaruguru mainly targeting youths and women forums.

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