The academia must actively engage in policy debate, says Prof. Shyaka

Rwanda Governance Board today published its third Governance Scorecard, a national barometer that look at performance in all key sectors in the country. The New Times’ Felly Kimenyi & Mary Ingabire had an interview with the board’s CEO Prof. Anastase Shyaka who gave an insight into the index, how they come up with the data and its impact and significance to the people of Rwanda. Excerpts Briefly tell us about the governance scorecard… The scorecard is one of the home grown initiatives in the country and it is a policy document produced periodically by our research department. The main purpose is to generate data that can serve as a reference in policy formulation and implementation. It’s a document with credible and reliable information on our governance and social sectors that can be used as a point of reference by national and international stakeholders. The second objective was to aim at driving policy reform through availing credible and reliable data. When we assess indicators, we point out those that have failed and provide policy recommendations. The third objective is that we wanted to put Rwanda on the world map in terms of creating a knowledge base since the scorecard has become an instrument that a number of countries look up to. What methodology do you use in coming up with the document? How representative is it to Rwandans? We use people’s satisfaction surveys, civil society surveys, hard data, qualitative data as well as institutional data. All these we get from civil society and private institutions but mainly public institutions. Regarding real data, if you for example want to know how many cases have been tried the previous year, you go to the justice sector, the Supreme Court, to other courts and so on, and we asses government along eight key indicators. Basically, from our perspective, we can look at this as an audit of the government. The indicators we measure are rule of law, safety and security, investing in people, investing in social and human development and we have an indicator on participation and inclusiveness. Others are political rights and civil liberties, quality of service delivery as well as economic and corporate governance. All these indicators portray a complex picture government covers, we go to the economy, security, human development and several other factors. Give us an overview of the 2014 Scorecard? We started this innovation in 2011; the RGS 2010 was produced in 2011 and there has been progressive improvement across all sectors up to this third edition. When you look at the major picture today, six out of the eight indicators are in green. Our scoring method is that when a score is above 75 per cent, we consider the indicator to be performing well and it is tagged green, between 75 and 50, it is performing fairly well and it is tagged yellow, and if the score is below 50 per cent, it means the indicator needs improvement. Below 50 per cent, there are tow colours; amber and red. Amber is given when a score lies between 50 and 25 per cent while red is given when the score lies below 25 per cent, meaning extremely weak performance. We use those eight indicators which are also further divided into 36 sub-indicators. And also the 36 are sub-divided into variables and in total, we have 160 variables. So basically, what we measure are variables and then we aggregate them to get sub-indicators and then we aggregate these to get indicator score. In our 2014 scorecard, six out of eight indicators are in green, 24 sub-indicators are green, and about 60 per cent of variables are green. So the more you go down, the lesser green you take and so about 30 are in yellow and nearly 10 are in amber and red. All in all, compared to the previous year, there’s an improvement and the most improved sector is rule of law. It has improved by over 8.3 per cent, which is very huge. Basically, when we started this, the rule of law was the least performing indicator and now its second best and this is because policymakers have been implementing our recommendations especially concerning access to justice. Rule of law is the best improved but not the best performing. The best performing is safety and security while the least performer is service delivery; here we look at how do the government instititutions both at local and central level deliver services to the people. The other indicator that has improved at the rate of over 3 per cent is political rights and civil liberties mainly because of media reforms; access to information has been worked upon. So people satisfaction to information has drastically improved. According to the scorecard, vibrancy of non state actors, though improved, remains in yellow…This has been improving but not as such, like in the academia, the scorecard is below 50 per cent so there is need for improvement. We do not have many academics engaging in policy debate and this is something that needs to change. Farmers in Ruryaraya in Rwamagana till their land recently. You are an academician, what could be behind the reluctance of your colleagues to engage in these debates? To me the issue here is structural and conjectural. The conjectural part of the issue is the dimension or the place occupied by research, the way it is conducted, the dialogue with policy makers… I have the impression that the rapidly growing university sector in Rwanda is not at par with that role of research in university life. So I think we are focusing more on teaching than the research dimension which explains the dismal performance. The second is structural, many universities lack resources for research because it’s relatively costly. So it may not because they don’t want, but probably the universities tend to look at the value of the professors and the time it takes them away from the classroom while doing research. But in my view, Rwanda needs to re-think about how our universities can get vibrant in debating policy issues. Otherwise we will become a society that is not putting our knowledge to maximum use. Do you think there is a disconnect between policymakers and the academic world? The disconnect might not be necessarily a policy issue or a systematic one, same as there might not necessarily be that disconnect but there are difficulties in making the connection functional and yielding results. In the other countries, especially the developed world, they make sure that connection becomes part of the life the nation breathes. The policymakers and academia link up, they exchange, challenge each other so whatever the issue is, I think the disconnection is not profitable to our policy making process and our nation to some extent, because they are not participating fully. Service delivery in public institutions has remained lagging in all scorecards. What could be the reason behind this? When you look at Rwanda’s transformation the last six years, we see what we call home grown solutions which have heavily contributed to our transformation simply because they reach many people. Two, Rwanda has gone through decentralisation faster than other nations but to some extent, it comes along with two contradictory parts. Where the service is done well, down there, it catalyses transformation very quickly and development. You can imagine “gir’inka” which has helped heavily, but when there’s complacenc or corruption at say a number of villages in a district level, you end up with thousands of cases. Bottom line is, these programmes that are going out to many people need to be followed very closely and we need to maximize our accountability. So things like small corruption affect the efficiency. Inefficiency and bad conduct including corruption are actually affecting the effectiveness of these programmes and service delivery. It comes clear even in our findings where the prevalence of bribe practices in the society is high. Well, they are lower compared to our neighbours but they are high compared to Rwanda’s aspirations and its perspective when you look at the goals, the vision, and the way this country does business. When you look at our social strata, over 70 per cent of our people are relying on agriculture which means again, if the extension services in agriculture are not fixed, don’t expect service delivery to improve. Because there will be 70 per cent of evaluators who aren’t happy. Agricultural sector must improve and we must improve extension services like markets for agricultural products. So its transformation will lead to more jobs. To fix this, recommendation number one is to increase production. Number two is improve on pace quality and consistency of service delivery, the third one is improving accountability especially in those programmes that target a big number of people. Actually we have two types of accountability we are recommending; one targets major programmes with a lot of money and can create boom for the nation and the other type that needs us to be very careful because it touches a big portion of the society, it can cause problems in social cohesion and fairness of the public institutions. The last recommendation concerns the civil society; we consider them as an opportunity which is dormant, and they can make huge contribution to national development. So as government, we need to facilitate them more for them to participate more. But at the same time this is a landscape where even people who do not wish well for you as a country may come up under the guise of nongovernmental organisation. They can be instrumentalised, that’s why institutions that are monitoring them need to be strengthened so that someone can follow them because they can cause a nightmare. It is not about us getting involved in their business but there has to be a framework; their activities have to be in line with our aspirations as a country and that is why we have mechanisms such as the joint action development forums. These organisations can freely criticise what is not going well but also at the same time, fully participate in national development and that needs a bit of coordination. How does this index rate on the international arena? First and foremost, one might say that Rwanda governance scorecard comes in to provide evidence on Rwanda. Some years back, think-tanks were producing false reports on Rwanda but we did not have evidence to counter their claims. Now we are generating data so that they can actually compare with their own findings and we are doing all we can to circulate this as widely as we possibly can. So we have the responsibility of engaging them and that is why for the first time, during this scorecard, we included external reviewers, who looked at the entire report. This is an important addition to the quality of our assessment. We want to take this element to a higher level. We want to link this to the sustainable development goals of the One UN; which is why Rwanda has been selected to pilot this because we already measure governance, which is a best practice globally. editorial@newtimes.co.rw

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The academia must actively engage in policy debate, says Prof. Shyaka