Rwanda is well known for a national-level commitment to technology and, as part of their Vision 2020 Plan, aims to establish Rwanda as the technology hub of central Africa. This initiative has inspired government ministries to take a leadership role in strengthening government services through the appropriate use of technology. Beginning in 2005, the Capacity Project partnered with the Ministry of Health (MOH) to address human resources for health issues, including the development of a system to support accurate, up-to-date data collection, management of staff and use of available data in decision making.
When we began work in Rwanda under the Capacity Project, the MOH did not have a consolidated source of electronic or paper records on their health workers. The Ministry clearly needed an information system for managing health personnel distributed across the country, which would offer easy remote updating and quickly provide current HR reports.
To effectively implement an information system, we worked with the Ministry to address gaps, including a lack of consistent data, no trained data collection personnel, and very little hardware and networking infrastructure. In a little over a year since the project began, we developed and installed iHRIS Manage, an HR management system designed to meet the immediate HR data collection needs for the MOH. We partnered with Columbia University on a $100,000 project to upgrade the Ministry's infrastructure to support the system. These upgrades not only improved user equipment but strengthened the entire network, including connectivity, email systems, backup and security. We trained and seconded an HRIS administrator to the Ministry to manage the information systems and server. We created a standard data collection form for use at the district level. The Ministry is now entering data into the iHRIS Manage system, which was officially launched in early 2007.
These results demonstrate the critical role that partnering with stakeholders can play in these complex activities. They also show the importance of the infrastructure improvement process and how vital it is to strengthen all parts of the system—not just software, but also hardware, networks, routine data collection and staff—to ensure a sustainable result.
Learn MoreThe Whole Picture: Strengthening Health Workforce Policies and Planning in Rwanda (Voices from the Capacity Project Series - PDF)