Family performance contract week launched

The government together with all stakeholders has launched a one month-long campaign aimed at raising awareness among Rwandan families on the need to continue improving their living conditions. Aloisea Inyumba, the Minister of Gender and Family Promotion, said that the government is conducting awareness initiatives around family values to provide specific orientations to guide families in striving for development. “The performance contract approach, as one of the home grown solutions, has proved beyond doubt that it helps to rapidly achieve development goals with tangible results,” she said. In the framework of this campaign, every family will be asked to make pledges on the basis of its real capacity as well as on the plans proposed by the Umudugudu (village) authorities. “Every household will be visited and thus given the opportunity to demonstrate its progress and constraints in the implementation of its performance contract,” Inyumba elaborated. The government, through Article 27 of the constitution, commits to ensure that a family flourishes as a foundation for national development. The one-month family campaign that runs from September 24 to October 29 will focus on concrete activities that will be conducted at household levels in the areas of family wellbeing and economic development. “We have managed to grow and develop because our culture and values have been protected. These contracts will help our children to grow responsibly,” Claudette Mukeshimana, a mother of three, said. Other issues such as child education and positive discipline, relationships between spouses, hygiene, nutrition and family planning, mechanized agriculture and modern animal husbandry will also be discussed. The family performance contract emulates leaders’ performance contracts-Imihigo, a monitoring instrument designed to help local authorities to plan and act realistically. Ends