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Rwanda: Reducing Poverty Through Economic Growth

As part of the Millennium Challenge Corporation's mandate to reduce poverty through economic growth, its threshold programs assist countries that are near eligibility for large-scale Millennium Challenge Account grants, or compacts. Threshold program assistance helps countries address areas for improvement indicated by their scores on policy indicators in three categories—ruling justly, investing in people, and encouraging economic freedom.

The Rwanda Threshold Program is intended to strengthen the rule of law, civil society, civic participation, media, and the inspectorate services of the national police. Specifically, the goals of the program are to:

• Improve the country’s judicial and legislative capacity by enhancing judges’ legal decision-writing skills, and promoting legislative reforms that enhance judicial independence and improve Rwanda’s scores on threshold indicators.
• Enhance the accountability of the Rwandan National Police by training staff on internal investigation techniques and supporting the rollout of a nationwide citizen complaint collection and response system.
• Support journalist training programs and the creation of two new community radio stations.
• Support the training of civil society organizations at the national level on internal management and effective advocacy. At the local level, the program is supporting a three-year initiative designed to strengthen civic participation through training for district government officials and village-level civil society groups. 

Mathematica is designing a rigorous and timely evaluation of these activities to determine their effectiveness for participants and others. Potential methodologies include a comparison group design for the police complaint filing system, pre-post surveys assessing the reach of new community radio stations, a pairwise random selection design for the local civic participation program (where training activities were randomly assigned to half of Rwanda’s 30 districts in the program’s first year), and qualitative designs for several additional program components. To carry out these options, we have proposed conducting a national survey of households on civic participation issues and perceptions of the police, media, and other institutions.

Publications

"Evaluation of the Rwanda Threshold Program: Baseline Report" (October 2011)
"Rwanda Threshold Program: Baseline Findings" Presentation (October 2011)