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.