Musoni upbeat over districts’ performance

Local Government Minister, James Musoni has described the recent districts ranking in the execution of last year’s performance contracts (imihigo) as “very impressive.”Districts scored an average of over 80 per cent in the last annual evaluation of the performance contracts for fiscal year 2011/2012.The minister who was speaking during a news briefing at ministry’s boardroom yesterday said district’s performance creates ground for sustained support for them to maintain momentum.At the event, heads of the ministry’s affiliated institutions signed performance contracts with the minister and he emphasised the role of evaluation based on performance targets.“This is not a mere ceremony…breakdown these broad guidelines further into exhaustive targets for your staff,” the minister said at the event.“Enable your staff to appreciate and own these targets and evaluation should be done on monthly basis,” he added.“By end of next week all of your staff should have signed their targets,” he emphasized.The ministry’s affiliate institutions include the National Demobilisation and Reintegration Commission, Rwanda Governance Board, the Media High Council, Rwanda Information Office, National Itorero Taskforce, National ID Agency, among others.At the conference minister Musoni announced that the employees at his ministry and its affiliate agencies are contributing to Rwf188 million to Agaciro Development Fund.Detailing the action plan for the fiscal year 2012/2013, the ministry’s acting Permanent Secretary; Egide Rugamba noted that preparation of a Media Barometer for Rwanda is among the activities to be undertaken this year.The barometer is designed to be an in-depth description and measurement system for national media environment. It assesses the media landscape of a country over time in order to provide strategic advocacy tools for media reform.Results announced last week of an evaluation of performance contracts saw Kicukiro district emerge star performer in fiscal year ended.Meanwhile, details on the review on Imihigo indicate that though Kicukiro emerged the overall best performer, a review of the performance of districts per cluster by this newspaper show that Karongi district performed remarkably well on governance and justice with 96.2 putting Kicukiro, the sterling performer on periphery with a difference of 7.4 per cent.In the social development cluster, Kamonyi district was the best performer with 96.9per cent. This cluster is formed by such indicators like: levels of hygiene, feeding, education and health.