Low participation
in public policy issues by women and other vulnerable groups in decision making
and community initiatives often stands in the way of holding the development
agenda in their hands and ensuring that their priority needs are met. However,
armed with a score card women in Gatsibo District in Rwanda are organizing
their communities and have become their own leaders by holding decision makers
accountable. This has made them a formidable force for change in their
communities.
Under the Public
Policy Information Monitoring and Advocacy project (PPIMA) in the district, women
community mobilizers, or animators, spearhead identification of needs in their
communities and inform other community members. This marks the beginning of an
engagement process that agrees on the needs to be addressed with the
involvement of decision makers and service providers.
By
employing the concept of the score card, the communities identify their
pressing issues directly affecting them, whether in health, education,
agriculture and other sectors, in relation to governance and service provision.
The
score card is a tool in which the women and their communities decide on
specific service indicators to assist them track the pace of addressing their
needs. Based on this they give scores and the reasons for the scores on the
progress made by the decision makers and/or service providers. The scores are
then analyzed and ranked to identify the gaps, forming the basis in planning
how to address them.
Women
remain among the most marginalized, along with the youth, people living with
disabilities and the historically marginalized peoples. However, women have
often suffered the “double tragedy” of not only being women, but at the same
time being marginalized as youth or people living with disabilities, and in
other marginalized groups.
Women
in Gatsibo District spearhead the identification of service delivery issues in
their communities paying special attention on the marginalized groups to ensure
their participation. This has helped them articulate the issues in all their
dimensions in the community.
The PPIMA
project was initiated in 2009 to respond to the issues related to governance,
service delivery, accountability and community participation at all levels of
development programming at the decentralized levels. The communities
work in collaboration with service providers where they agree on issues and
come up with solutions, including agreeing on issues to be included at the
district and national levels as development priorities.
The
process has proved empowering as it directly places the development agenda on
the hands of the women and their communities based on their needs and issues.
The
PPIMA project is a collaboration between RWN and
the Norwegian People’s Aid and is being implemented in 40 villages in Gatsibo
District.
Rwanda Women's Network (RWN) is one of the four partner institutes of the African Centers of Excellence (ACE) for Women's Leadership program run by the Institute of International Education (IIE) , Ethiopia Office.
For more on IIE , ACE or RWN please follow the links below.
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