Rwanda: partner country of the Netherlands

The development relationship between the Netherlands and Rwanda has existed since 1994, when the Netherlands was one of the first donors to provide humanitarian aid just after the genocide. In 2001, the Netherlands added Rwanda to the list of partner countries with which it has a long-standing relationship in development cooperation. Rwanda is officially a poor country with a reasonable degree of stability and improving governance. This makes it one of the countries where, with additional efforts from donors and close cooperation with the government, achieving the Millennium Development Goals should be feasible. The most important of these goals are a halving of poverty and hunger, all children (both girls and boys) in school, a sharp reduction of maternal and infant/child mortality and conservation of natural resources.

Rwanda is also situated in an unstable region, and domestic stability and security cannot yet be guaranteed in the mid-to-long term. These fragile aspects of the country and region are also determining factors for the Dutch effort.

The majority of the Netherlands’ support for Rwanda goes through the embassy in Kigali. The embassy has a long-term strategic plan which states how and where the Netherlands will support Rwanda. The budget for 2009 is 25.5 million euros.

In December of 2008, Minister Bert Koenders (Development Cooperation) decided to provisionally suspend Dutch general budget support to Rwanda. This form of aid flows directly into the recipient country’s national treasury without the donor determining its purpose. It is intended for the implementation of the country’s entire budget. This type of support is given on the condition that the recipient country is pursuing a sound policy and that meaningful dialogue is possible about results and the government’s plans.

The direct reason for the suspension was the publication of a UN report accusing Rwanda of being involved in the conflict in its western neighbour, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Although Rwanda’s performance has greatly improved since then, more time is needed to fully recover confidence. There are also concerns about the political situation in Rwanda itself, in the areas of freedom of expression, political breadth and equality. As good partners, Rwanda and the Netherlands remain in dialogue about these subjects.

The planned budget support for Rwanda for 2009 was four million euros. Two million euros of the support has been suspended and the remaining two million is now earmarked for expenses of the Rwandan government for peace and stability. Other programmes were not affected by the decision on budget support, and accordingly Rwanda remains one of the partner countries with which the Netherlands maintains a long-standing and wide-ranging relationship.

More important than the money are the results that the Netherlands aims to achieve in and with Rwanda. After careful analysis, the Netherlands decided to focus its aid on three policy areas, in two of which the embassy aims to be a very active or leading donor. Being active in a limited number of fields and making clear agreements about who takes the leadership role are fixed aspects of the modern agenda for making aid effective. The Netherlands is an ardent advocate of this Paris & Accra Agenda, and this holds for its policy in Rwanda as well. The three policy areas chosen are good governance, strengthening the private sector and education.
TOP

Good Governance

The first policy field chosen by the embassy is ‘Good Governance’, with the accent on Justice and Decentralisation. After the genocide, Rwanda had shortages of everything, including administration of justice and reconciliation. How was a country supposed to continue when a tenth of its population was slaughtered in a hundred days? The crimes must not go unpunished, but there were no more judges and virtually no judicial system left. From the beginning, the Netherlands saw how important this was and provided support in this area. Among other projects, they financed the building of a prison, since all the country’s prison cells were filled to bursting. There is also a long cooperative relationship with the Supreme Court aimed at training judges and implementing the gacaca, a local justice system that Rwanda has reinstated in order to deal with genocide cases more quickly. The projects are now finishing up one by one and, along with other donors, the Netherlands is switching to support for the entire judicial sector through a direct contribution to the sector’s budget. This amounts to 3.8 million euros per year for the next few years. The intended results include improved access to justice and greater respect for human rights.

The Netherlands also sees decentralisation (more funding and authority to the thirty districts) as an essential aspect of good governance. The districts are closer to the Rwandan citizens, who can have greater influence on planning at the administrative level and also have a better view of the implementation of these plans. Rwanda is energetically working on giving more power to the districts, which get money directly from a national fund for investments in district-level social and economic development. Special forums for input and participation in the districts have been set up, in which all interested parties participate. These consultative forums can develop into the place where the government is accountable to its citizens and where citizens make their priorities known. The Netherlands is supporting the investment fund with three million euros per year and soon will support the forums as well, in close cooperation with the SNV agency and the Rwandan Interior Ministry (Minaloc). Several human-rights non-governmental organisations are also receiving Dutch support, about one million euros per year.

The total funding for Good Governance is about 8 million euros.
TOP

Strengthening the private sector

The second policy field where the Netherlands is focusing its efforts is the strengthening of the private sector. Economic growth is an absolute condition for reducing poverty, and this will mainly have to come from the private sector. However, the sector consists of more than a few businessmen in the capital Kigali; rural farmers – the vast majority of the Rwandan population – are explicitly in the picture as well. It is essential that farmers, like any other entrepreneur, be able to sell their products on the market and that their yields are high enough for them to live from what they produce. To achieve this goal, investments are necessary in rural roads, in irrigation and water management and in construction of terraced fields in order to retain more water and prevent erosion. Farmers also need access to credit, fertiliser and good seeds, and they operate more effectively when they are organised. The Netherlands is an active partner in Rwanda in all these areas.

One huge obstacle for entrepreneurs in Rwanda is a lack of skilled workers and knowledge of trades. Although large investments in education mean that now nearly all children (95%) are going to school, the quality of education is low and there are almost no lower or middle-level vocational training programmes. Those that exist do not match well with the labour market; the students they deliver are not the skilled personnel needed by the private sector. The government is well aware of this problem and investment in technical and vocational education is now a high priority. The embassy is helping with two large-scale programmes aimed at improving the curricula and in particular at helping connect theory and practice.

Lastly, the general business climate also weighs heavily for companies and investors. How complicated is the regulatory system, how much time does it take to get a permit, how easy is it to import and export? These matters are kept track of by the World Bank, which publishes an annual report comparing over 170 countries with each other. Rwanda has come up on the list in the last few years and is now at number 139, but the country has great ambitions and aims to push through quickly to the top 100. To do so entails making many changes in its legislative and regulatory system, which is often highly specialised work. The Netherlands is helping to pay for this assistance through a daughter company of the World Bank.

Total spending for private sector development in 2009 is about 9.5 million euros. More than half of this is going to rural areas, and half of that goes directly to the very poorest: the road-improvement and terrace construction projects employ thousands of day labourers, of whom almost half are women. Investment and combating poverty literally go hand in hand.
TOP

Silent partner in Education

The third sector is education, which is still the best investment in development and reducing poverty. Research has shown that there is a direct connection between the number of years of education a person has had and their income later in life. This does not mean that all aid must go to Education, as that would create imbalances. However, the Netherlands has stipulated that at least fifteen percent of all aid must go to education. And it is putting this into practice in Rwanda as well. For five years, the Ministry of Education of Rwanda will receive six million euros per year to enable more children to go to school and to offer them better education. The embassy has made wide-ranging agreements with British colleagues at DFID about the division of tasks. They are active in policy dialogue and keep close track of the results. The Netherlands is a ‘silent partner’, and is kept informed of events by DFID. This kind of agreement is an efficient way to spend aid money, as fewer expensive experts are needed, and the government has fewer partners to deal with.

The financial picture (in rounded euros)

2009
1. Good governance    8.0 mln
Better access to justice

Government closer to citizens

Compliance with human rights

2. Private sector         9.5 mln
Investments for farmers

Better professional training and knowledge

Better business climate

3. Education 6.0 mln
Every child to a good school

4. Peace and stability
One-time expense replacing budget support
2.0 mln
TOTAL 25.5 mln

TOP

Other Dutch support for Rwanda

The support in three policy fields is the core of the long-running cooperative relationship between the Netherlands and partner country Rwanda. In aligning with government plans, the Netherlands is making a substantial contribution towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals in Rwanda. However, in addition to this long-running budget delegated to the embassy, there are more Dutch programmes and disbursements in Rwanda which are contributing to growth and to reducing poverty. Below is a summary of the most important of these.

Renewable energy

Minister for Development Cooperation Bert Koenders has aimed to give strong encouragement to investments in poor countries in renewable energy. In 2007 he allocated 500 million euros for this purpose worldwide. There is 150 million euros budgeted for the Great Lakes Region, 60 million of which will be spent in Burundi, Tanzania and DRC on projects which fall under the auspices of the Dutch embassies in those three countries.

How the remaining 90 million euros will be spent is coordinated from the embassy in Kigali. It is a temporary programme – all money must be spent by 2012 at the latest. The accent is on access to sustainable energy for poor people. In the Great Lakes, the vast majority of people depend on wood for cooking.

One-third of these investments is directed towards biomass, mainly wood to be used as cooking fuel. Through a regional project (20 million euros) the Netherlands is supporting the planting of trees and improving the market for firewood in DRC, Burundi and Rwanda. The guiding principle is that farmers come to see trees as a crop which they then will grow for the local market. In another project (10 million euro) trees will be planted on government land in Rwanda, to meet the huge demand for firewood.

Another third of the regional energy programme is directed at generation and distribution of energy from hydroelectric power in the Rusizi, the river in the border area between Rwanda, DRC and Burundi. Part of this money will go to renovate an existing plant operated jointly by the three countries, which is in need of maintenance. The rest is intended for the construction of high-tension wires to transport the energy from the place of generation to the user. The contracts for these projects are still in the preparatory phase.

Finally, the Netherlands is investing 30 million euros into the roll-out of Rwanda’s national energy plan, mainly intended to improve access to clean, sustainable energy for the countryside of Rwanda in the coming years. The plan was presented in the spring of 2009 and implementation will start in July.

Support for higher education

The support for primary education and lower and middle vocational training is part of the delegated programme of the embassy, as it is in most countries. In Rwanda, as in most partner countries, support for higher and academic education goes via Nuffic, the Dutch organisation for cooperation between universities. There is 10 million euros available for 2009-2012, the precise amount depending on the final proposals. The Nuffic programme is closely linked to the choices of the embassy: support for higher education is earmarked for ‘good governance’, ‘private sector development’ or ‘natural resources and stability’.

Support for civil society

A society is more than its government alone. Although the embassy does support several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in human rights, most support for Rwandan NGOs goes through the Dutch co-financing organisations Oxfam Novib, Icco and Cordaid. They pay for their programmes partly from their own funds, and partly from a grant from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Each has its own area of specialisation. Oxfam Novib focuses mainly on human rights, Icco on land issues and Cordaid on reconciliation. In the interplay of organisations busily engaged in reducing poverty, these organisations and the embassy each play their own parts, in which the NGOs often go further in their criticism of the Rwandan government. But there is good communication in both directions, and they strive to complement each other and reinforce each other’s activities and programmes when possible.

Support for regional stability and peace

Regional, cross-border development projects each contribute in their own way to stability in the region. The regional programme for the Great Lakes is managed by the embassy in Kigali. In 2009 there is 6.2 million euros available, partly intended for managing the cross-border nature reserves, such as the mountain gorilla habitat in the Virungas.

The Netherlands takes the standpoint that activities aimed at generating income for poor people contribute to conflict prevention. After all, young people with no future are more inclined to take part in illegal trading or armed activities. The Netherlands also supports projects that disarm, demobilise and re-integrate soldiers, including child soldiers, in society. The Netherlands is also one of the largest donors to MONUC, the UN army that protects civilians in neighbouring DRC, among others against rebels who were active during the genocide in Rwanda, known as ‘génocidaires’.

What few people know is that the Rwandan army is also active as a peacekeeping force in Darfur. Rwanda is striving to have a well-functioning army that is capable of protecting civilians. They feel that the UN armies sent there during the genocide and now in eastern DRC were (and are) not up to their tasks. Rwanda wants to be a good example and the Netherlands is helping them by giving trainings and supplying materials, which they purchase from the Netherlands, partly with their own funds. The Netherlands also contributes to ACOTA, an American programme in several African countries including Rwanda which improves conditions and training for soldiers sent for peace-keeping missions.

Support via international organisations

The majority of the total aid to Rwanda goes through international organisations. The most important of these are the World Bank, the European Commission and the United Nations. The Netherlands’ contributions to these institutions thus also provide indirect support to efforts to combat poverty in Rwanda. The Netherlands tries to ensure that the signals from the international organisations to Rwanda are in line with the Dutch position. For example, it may seem odd that the Netherlands’ bilateral general budget support to Rwanda has been suspended while the EU – to which the Netherlands also contributes – pays a much larger amount for budget support. However, sometimes it is simply not possible to find a majority for one’s own standpoint in large associations such as the European Commission.

And that’s not all – by far

Relations between the Netherlands and partner country Rwanda take many forms and colours, running along very diverse networks and channels, too many to summarise here. In addition to the support already mentioned through larger organisations, there are also many more small initiatives started up by Dutch people who, for the most disparate reasons, have a connection with Rwanda and want to work towards improving life for the Rwandese.

Rwanda and aid

Rwanda is a poor country with large-scale dreams and great ambitions. By 2020 the country intends to have moved from among the poorest countries to being a middle-income country in the same category as Ghana or Botswana, currently much wealthier than Rwanda. It is not yet there. Currently, Rwanda is still very dependent on foreign aid. The total budget for the country is over 800 million euros (comparable with that of the Dutch municipality of Eindhoven) for 2009. Half of this comes from the country’s own income and the rest is matched from abroad. Rwanda cannot get by without aid in the short term, but it intends to use this aid to reduce its dependence. That is precisely what the Netherlands intends as well.
TOP