On the way to digitizing Rwanda - RISA's 5-Year Strategy

Digitizing entire sectors and turning Rwanda into a digital economy takes special attention to developing and implementing ICT policies. This mandate is held by RISA which is supporting the digitization efforts in all sectors like health, education and agriculture. Therefore, GIZ supports RISA in setting up a 5-year strategic plan to define its responsibilities and principles going forward.

In countries where the implementation and enforcement of ICT policies play an important role, growth of the IT sector is much more likely to emerge. In Rwanda, the Rwanda Information Society Authority (RISA) holds this mandate of leading the implementation of ICT policies. Part of this mandate is to streamline research, innovation, and infrastructure investment. In order to fulfil this mission and to fast-track economic growth, RISA concentrates on digitizing government services. Moreover, RISA supports many government actors in digitizing their departments and sectors.

RISA’s 5-Year Strategic Plan

To fulfill its mandate, RISA intends to develop a strategic plan to guide its efforts over the next five years. GIZ supports RISA in this process of aligning the strategy with the revised Smart Rwanda Master Plan. Particularly, the strategic plan will guide operations to increase effectiveness and service delivery. At the same time, it will base on the existing and new initiatives through more intensive usage of ICT as a cross-cutting enabler for the development of other sectors.

The purpose of this strategy is to provide a clear institutional governance structure for the integrated and centralized management of all Government of Rwanda ICT strategies. Furthermore, it highlights the processes of prioritizing tasks and allocating key resources by RISA. Another of RISA’s responsibilities will be the outlining of cultural and business processes that will allow RISA to ensure the ongoing development of IT experts.

3-project-steps-for-the-RISA-5-year-strategy

Principles and programs going forward

The RISA strategy is underpinned by a number of principles which includes:

Expand and Improve quality of public services

through adoption of greater standardization and simplification

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Invest in workforce

to increase innovation, ability, capacity and professionalism

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Benchmark ICT investment, costs, and performance annually

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Utilize effective portfolio, program and project management techniques

for maximizing the impact of ICT-enabled change

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Focus on innovation, interoperability, and open standards

to facilitate information sharing, collaboration and accessibility to deliver greater value for money

The strategy prioritizes and consolidates a number of significant cross-government and agency programs already underway. In some cases, this includes expanding their scope to meet the Government’s transformation goals. As concepts and benefits are proven, new initiatives will be added.

Early delivery of ICT investment planning changes and the development of a new operating model are both critical to the success of the RISA Strategy. As a matter of fact, it will be a priority of RISA as well as Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDA’s). This is a deliberate move towards a more disciplined approach, where the emphasis is on quick delivery.

Lastly, the RISA strategy monitoring, and evaluation framework describes the key indicators that will be in use to measure progress and impact in the implementation of the RISA strategy. RISA will work in partnership with both public and private stakeholders to measure impact.

The RISA strategy is just one of the activities we support at the DigiCenter. If you would like to get to know more about our work, have a look at our solutions and events, and follow us on social media.

On the way to digitizing Rwanda – RISA’s 5-Year Strategy