Safety, security top governance scorecard 2012

Safety and security registered the highest score of 91.36 per cent in the Rwanda Governance Scorecard 2012, released by the Rwanda Governance Board (RGB).The feat received uttermost recognition from the UN, which termed Rwanda as the securest and safest country on the continent.The two aspects garnered points in maintaining security, national security, personal or property security, as well as reconciliation, social cohesion or unity, scoring 96, 94, 91 and 83 per cent respectively.The report further indicates that “Investing in people” scored 78.8, while the indicator of “corruption/transparency/accountability” was not far off with 77.1 per cent.Political rights or civil liberties” scored 75.26 per cent; participation or inclusiveness scored 75 per cent, rule of law 73 per cent, while quality of service delivery scored the least with 70.4.During the report launch yesterday in Kigali, graced by Prime Minister Pierre Damien Habumuremyi, the CEO of RGB, Prof. Anastase Shyaka, acknowledged that governance had generally improved.“Community safety, access to justice and accessibility indicators went up in the new scorecard. Despite the fact that quality of service was ranked last, it registered an improvement of 4.23 percent compared to the 2010 scorecard,” Shyaka said.“A unique and significant aspect of this scorecard vis-a-vis external assessment is that it utilises indicators from locally-generated data such as citizen participation survey and detailed citizen data which are often not considered by external indexes.”Compared to the previous survey, access to legal aid tops the most improved areas with a progress of 25.18 per cent to 67 per cent, while civil society participation improved by 8.28 to 62 per cent and access to public information increased by 5.5 per cent to 57 per cent.Prime Minister Pierre Damien Habumuremyi yesterday said government is already considering implementing the recommendations of scorecard report.“We shall stay committed to incorporating all ideas into the development strategy in order to get high scores, especially in the areas where challenges were highlighted,” Habumuremyi said.UN hails reportThe UN Resident Coordinator, Lamin Mamadouh Manneh, hailed the report as a “perfect” or “almost perfect,” analytical tool which the UN regularly relies on for setting targets in Rwanda.“In general, we believe that the Rwanda Governance Scorecard is a comprehensive governance assessment tool which reflects continued commitment by the government to evidence based policies, laws, programmes that have continually driven reforms in Rwanda,” Manneh said.He said the indicator on “quality of service” which scored the lowest means there is need for continual improvement of the service sector and accountability in delivery.“Our main conclusion is that the democratic process in Rwanda is on the right track and the government continues to make efforts to nurture it,” Manneh said. “Many areas that critics point to are still work in progress, as understood by the improvements made from the previous reports.”He recommended that government and its partners should analyse the report and work on areas that need improvement.Amongst its key recommendations, the report states that the justice sector needs to address the problem of the backlog of cases which is still high, especially for civil cases.It also suggests that government should increase the budget allocated to the education sector from 15.83 per cent to at least 20 per cent to improve the quality of education.

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Safety, security top governance scorecard 2012