1.6 Significance and Justification of the Study
It is envisaged that this study will tend to immensely benefit
a cluster of beneficiaries among them the Government of Rwanda, Civil society,
the general citizens and other researchers. The Government of Rwanda (GoR) is
the intended primary beneficiary of the findings of this research. It is hoped
that the findings of the study will help put Rwanda into the driver?s seat
and help her devise its development programs and in leading coordination
processes. MINECOFIN (2004).
This research hopes to improve the relationship between Rwanda
and the donor community so that it becomes mutually beneficial rather than
lap-sided as is the case at present. The study shall also motivate and
stimulate other researchers hence they will have the intellectual vigour to
continuously advance scholarship into this seemingly grey area. In parallel to
this diversity amongst donors, the GoR itself responds in different ways to
individual donor agencies, in tune with its own perspectives of them and their
histories in Rwanda, and on the basis of its own strategic interests. This
research seeks to analyse these different perspectives on Rwanda in light of
the international consensus on aid effectiveness. It questions the diversity
amongst donors and the political factors on both the donor and recipient sides
which lie behind the aid relationship.
This study helps in identifying the explicit challenges that
Rwanda faces and strategies that could be designed for its socio-economic
development through Foreign Aid. In particular the research will sensitize the
citizens of Gasabo District to the negative or positive implications of donor
aid so that they deal with donor aid carefully.
This conscientization will help them avoid dependency
syndromes and to indigenize projects including those that are donor-funded. In
a sense they will own their development programs. On the whole, the study will
expose some of the shortcomings of the approaches being currently used by the
institutions such as United Nations Development Program (UNDP), United States
Agency for International Development (USAID), International Monetary Fund IMF,
World Bank (WB) among others to improve the Rwanda socio-economic development.
The general citizens of Rwanda will turn immensely benefit in that they will
have a deeper insight into causes and nature of hunger as well as getting an
enlightenment particularly after interacting with the key findings and
recommendation of this study.
Finally, the choice of the case study in this research is
deliberate - to examine the ultimate impact of foreign aid on the people of
Rwanda. It is both an exploratory and explanatory study which examines whether
or not foreign aid is a blessing or a curse. If it is a blessing, then how best
can it be further localized; if it is otherwise, then what home-grown solutions
can be given in place of foreign aid so that either way socio-economic
development can be realized?
In the final analysis although the results of this study are
confined to Gasabo (Rwanda), the insights into how donor aid can be used
sustainably can certainly be useful to all recipient countries in their
generality. The motivation of this study to the future researchers, it will
reanimate them in depth with the new approaches about the foreign aid and MDGs
in LDCs and will add more knowledge to the existing intellectual studies.
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