The Ubudehe initiative seeks to promote self governance and greater citizen engagement in matters of governance. It puts into operation the principle of citizens participation through local collective action. While the Ubudehe initiative is still ongoing, it has achieved several milestones.
One of the them is the fact that Ubudehe has transformed the nature of Participatory Poverty Assessments (PPAs), moving away from traditional approaches to ones where citizens are truly in control. Rwanda is the only country to have achieved 100% nationwide coverage where all 9000 villages were actively involved and participated in developing their own social maps and visual representations and data of the state and extent of poverty and exclusion that various social groups face in Rwanda. The use of social maps has begun to transform and influence new thinking in Rwanda about how national statistical systems can shift away from survey based methodologies to ones that are controlled by citizens and thereby capture citizen voice and preferences regularly. By 2007 citizens in all villages had actively participated in generating social maps and defining and stating their preferences and priority problems. The information generated from social maps is now being used to act as performance measures to hold national government and relevant ministries accountable against commitments made.
The second major achievement was the fact that citizens not only captured and stated their preferences and characteristics of poverty, but had the opportunity to come together in collective action to do something about priority problems they had stated. In 2006-2007 2007, across 9000 villages, citizens came together to solve the problems they had highlighted (from restocking livestock lost during genocide, to provision of public goods such as primary health care or water in collaboration with government). In 2007-2008, 15000 villages will benefit from the same support. In total, 25 million euros will be distributed directly to all the villages from the central bank demonstrating how resource transfers from central government can take place fluidly and without much administrative costs directly to citizen groups. This major experience has begun to influence the design and shape of the Common Development Fund (CDF) to ensure that citizens become active agents in planning, budgeting, use, implementation and monitoring of state and donor resources in the provisioning of public goods. The Ubudehe initiative now boasts several thousand examples of active citizen action demonstrating the power of a proactive citizenry if governments can play a more active enabling role for their citizens. The ability of citizens, emerging from the trauma of genocide, to come together and work together to solve common problems has contributed significantly to national healing and trust building crucial for long lasting peace.
Several independent audits and studies have consistently demonstrated that Ubudehe has achieved high value for money by ensuring resources go directly to citizens and contributed to increased citizenship and democratization in Rwanda. But most importantly, across all villages in Rwanda ubudehe is known, and citizens have actively engaged in one way or an other in problem defining and solving processes.
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