Rwanda Development Board (RDB) has embarked on a new re-orientation strategy to boost its mandate as a public institution, its Chief Executive, John Gara, has disclosed. 

In an exclusive interview with The New Times, Gara said that the purpose of the re-orientation is to enable the institution to fast-track the transformational agenda.

"It is a process that is meant to ensure that from time to time, you try to improve. In other words, an organisation cannot remain static in terms of how it does it activities,” Gara said.

Part of the new plan is to make RDB’s economic cluster departments to become more involved in investment promotion activities than ever before.

Gara noted that most of the departments at the institution were created around various economic clusters, stressing that they would now be expected to provide more support to the investment promotion department.

A case in point, Gara said, is the ICT department which previously focused on building national ICT infrastructure such as the fibre optic, but which is now required to also give the investment promotions department fresh ideas on investment strategies centred on the ICT sector.

The RDB top manager, however, emphasised that his institution is not restructuring in any way.

To examine whether it is performing its mandate, RDB has embarked, as part of the new re-orientation strategy, on a new self evaluation mechanism based on more clearly defined metrics.

"It is very important that we know what we are aiming at, for us to know if we are succeeding. The way to do that is to give ourselves metrics. And our metrics have got to be quite clear,” Gara added.

For full details of the interview, see the Q&A section.

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