Progress against Rwanda’s Vision 2020 key indicators’ targets

Abstract: Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is recognised as an essential management tool that helps to ensure that policies, programmes, and projects (commonly known as interventions) are implemented as planned and to assess the extent to which these government interventions have achieved or failed to achieve their desired results. Since 2000, most of the Government of Rwanda’s (GoR) development programmes have been implemented to achieve the objectives of Vision 2020. The GoR’s Vision 2020 has been implemented for over 17 years (2000 to 2017) and the 2020 deadline is looming. However, a critical but often forgotten question is to what extent the GoR has progressed towards achieving the targets of Vision 2020 – or whether the GoR will be able to achieve all the objectives of Vision 2020 before 2020. The objective of this article is to provide an interim report on the GoR’s progress towards achieving the objectives of Vision 2020 and to apply the “Physical Performance Rating System” developed by the Ugandan government (Byamugisha and Basheka, 2016, p.3) to determine the targets for the Vision 2020 key indicators that have been achieved at the time of this research (2017): those that are likely to be achieved, those that may be achieved, and those that cannot reasonably be achieved in the remaining years – given the current rate of progress. As an interim evaluation, this article makes an early contribution to what will doubtless become substantial literature on the evaluation the GoR’s Vision 2020 in the future. The broader contribution of this article “is towards the development of theoretically informed but empirically grounded” (Byrne, Randall & Theakston, 2017, p.203) M&E research, which is explicitly attentive to the social, economic, political, and structural conditions peculiar to Rwanda