RURAL SMALL AND MICROENTERPRISE
PROMOTION PROJECT

THE PROJECT

Organization and Management

The Ministry for Finance and Economic Planning will be responsible for overseeing the project and will delegate responsibility for coordination and management to MINICOM. A National Project Steering Committee (NPSC) will be established. Coordination at the provincial level will be ensured by the Provincial Project Coordination Committee. With the support of six provincial offices, the PCU will be responsible for project coordination and overall management. The new provincial offices will follow a schedule of establishment, expansion of operations, consolidation and phasing-out.
Private sector operators (PSOs) will be contracted to provide the required services under components 1 and 2. For component 3, suitable MFIs, NGOs and commercial banks will be
contracted for microfinance, supported by a small project unit attached to the PCU and provincial offices. The PSOs will recruit rural enterprise advisors (REAs) for the training of trainers. Each REA will cover 150-200 SMEs and will advise/train microenterprises and local professional organizations (POs). The POs are federations, associations and professional chambers and the project will build their capacity to provide the services required by SMEs. Drawing on the most successful SMEs, the POs will select enterprise advisors (EAs) who will carry out advisory duties and implement apprenticeship programmes while continuing the management of their own SMEs. They may advise SMEs on management, technology and marketing. Initially, the EAs will receive some payment from the project but once activities expand this support will be discontinued and the EAs will charge a fee to the SMEs.

Sustainability and exit strategy. From the outset, the project will focus on helping the POs provide services at a cost to the microenterprises. Based on the performance of the POs, the provincial offices will be phased out gradually and responsibility for the continued provision of services to SMEs will be transferred to the POs/PSOs. This process builds on experience from the first phase, where POs and EAs are already taking up responsibilities, and from collaboration with GTZ in Butare. Phasing-out of the current project office in Byumba (also covering Ruhengeri) is underway and in two years all functions will be transferred to the POs/PSOs, providing a model for other provinces. The project will recruit an expert for one year to support the POs in Byumba and Ruhengeri in fully assuming their tasks. Based on this experience, a strategy will be developed for use in the other provinces.

Project planning, monitoring and evaluation. The project coordinator and M&E specialist will have final responsibility for planning and M&E. However, the development of the annual work programmes and budgets (AWP/Bs) will engage all staff, contracted service providers and beneficiaries. Using participatory review and planning methodologies and past experience, specific plans will be prepared for all provinces and institutions involved in the project, and for the PCU.

The M&E system aims to assist project management, service providers and beneficiaries in effectively executing the project and verify if targets and objectives are being met. The logical framework, regularly reviewed and updated, together with the AWP/Bs, will be the main tools to facilitate project M&E. Every three months, the project will conduct per province participatory workshops, each time in a different district. A diagnostic needs assessment will be conducted at the end of the first phase to serve as a planning base during the start-up period. Effective project monitoring will involve continuous critical observation of progress in terms of outputs achieved, activities needed to achieve the outputs, provision of resources required, and the required budgets and actual expenditure for these activities. A key output will be the timely preparation of comprehensive quarterly, half-yearly and annual progress reports. After the second year a Mid-Term Review will be conducted to assess the success of the approaches and the achieved outputs and impact. In addition, a system of regular internal and external evaluation will be established using national consultants and institutions.