The Rise of Homegrown Ideas and Grassroots Voices: New Directions in Social Policy in Rwanda

At the core of Rwanda’s social policy renaissance is the emphasis on the homegrown and grassroots centered generation of intellectual and material resources, utilized with the aim of ensuring a local population familiar with and favorably disposed to government social policy. In the past decade and a half, Rwanda has gradually but consistently charted this path in social policy action through the establishment of systems and processes that focus on ensuring that citizens—and not government or donors—are held accountable for development prioritization and the achievement of set goals. Indigenous knowledge, endogenous thinking patterns, grassroots based participation and cultural considerations have—as much as feasibly possible within the Rwandan polity—characterized efforts aimed at social policy action.

At the time of collaboration, Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu was a researcher at the University of Rwanda. She collaborated with the UNRISD research project "New Directions in Social Policy: Alternatives for and from the Global South."