Public Private Partnerships (PPP) were introduced by the Government of Rwanda in order to enable it leverage private sector finances to meet service and infrastructure needs. Enacted by Law N°14/2016 of 02/05/2016 governing public private partnerships and the relating PPP Guidelines of 2017, the subsequent application still requires joint efforts from key players including the Central Government, Local Government and the private sector. This preoccupation was one of the backbone subjects for a two day training held at Karongi from 18th to 19th July 2019 to the attention of District Project Management Committees (DPMC).

By definition, a PPP is referred to as “a long-term contract between a public party and a private party, for the development and/or management of a public asset or service, in which the private party bears significant risk and management responsibility through the life of the contract, and remuneration is significantly linked to performance, and/or the demand or use of the asset or service”.

As per the current state of affairs on the private sector’s role in the implementation of LED projects at district level, the former’s involvement is actually less significant. Commenting on this, Mrs KANKINDI Léoncie, Vice Mayor in charge of Economic Development of Rusizi District, said that “the private sector is not usually involved, but their participation would be of great importance since they represent project beneficiaries. If the private sector gets directly involved or works closely with DPMC, the conception of such projects, their financing and implementation as well shall be well understood and realized. In addition, the private sector shall help us sensitize beneficiaries about citizen engagement into impact driven projects which meet societal needs”.   

Mrs. KARUNGI Charity, Partnership Development Officer at MINALOC, acknowledges that there are still challenges and gaps in carrying out PPP projects at both central and LG levels: “At central level, PPP projects have been established and more are in pipeline because of its position in engaging public-private partnerships. At a local level, we have around 50 PPP projects but varying in different arrangements ranging from joint-ventures to divestiture. The challenges are similar at both levels but the major ones are lack of capacity building and uncoordinated and standardized projects. At local level in particular the gap lies into lacking a clear and comprehensive strategy to take into PPP models, which makes it hard to convince investors that have potentiality to initiate a PPP Project”.

Mrs. KARUNGI revealed that there is a plan to introduce continuous PPP dialogues in all Districts to find out ways of exploiting local economic potentialities. “Although the LG/Districts have embraced the PPP initiative and have developed projects before, more effort is needed to develop PPP dialogues at district levels of which will be a baseline for discussing any potentialities in their districts with the PSF and how best they can exploit them into nurturing projects for the local economic development to occur. The private sector is interested in engaging with the public sector and districts should engage with them to share information on how well to develop partnerships that will result to PPP enterprises, advantages and aim at attracting their investments”, she advised.  “There is a lot of interest from the private sector to embrace the PPP initiative, but lack of information, especially on existing projects, ‘is still a big challenge towards building strong PPPs’. There is need to develop a detailed PPP strategy that will raise investor appetite for the existing projects”, she added on.

As further explained during the training, PPP are advantageous in that: (1) when districts invest in PPP Projects, there is an assurance that the investment done is necessary and more effective public resource management; (2) there is an assurance of higher quality and timely provision of public services since monitoring and evaluation is done by both parties involved in the implementation of a project; (3) when most investments are done in due terms, there are likely not to be any unforeseen public sector expenditures; (4) there is a utilization of the private sector expertise and experiences  in PPP projects implementation yet with a higher understanding of all stakeholders involved; and (5) there is reduction of risk management expenditures and a greater value for money when incentivising on-time and within budget delivery, providing an opportunity to innovate, optimising life cycle costs, optimizing and ensuring appropriate risk allocation.

According to the aforementioned law in its article 5, the potential sectors for PPPs in infrastructure and services include: (1) Transportation, including roads, railways, airports, bridges, tunnels, waterways and inland ports; (2) Energy including water energy, gas energy, solar energy, wind energy, geothermal energy, biogas energy and peat; (3) Social affairs, including those related to education, culture, health, sports and leisure; (4) Tourism, including tourism related to history, hotels, parks and tourism attractions; (5) Natural resources and environment, including those related to forestry, oil and oil products, minerals, water sanitation and waste disposal; (6) Telecommunication and information technology; and (7) any other sectors as may be determined by an Order of  Prime Minister.

To sum up, DPMC members who benefited from this refresher training include Vice Mayors in charge of Economic Development, District Executive Secretaries, Directors of Planning, Directors of Infrastructure & One Stop Centre, Directors of BDEUs, Directors of Agriculture, JADF Officers, Environment Management Officers & Legal Advisors. Apart from PPP, other topics subjected to training discussions include: (1) Project management cycle (2) Feasibility studies (3) Budget planning (4) Contract management (5) Monitoring, evaluation and controlling (6) Project risk management and problem solving (7) Operation and maintenance (8) Leadership and management in the context of LED and (9) Leadership and management in context of LED. Participants to this event expressed the need for periodical refresher training leading to efficient and effective implementation of LED project management.