Support for RSSB strategy and data infrastructure
The Rwanda Social Security Board (RSSB) is deeply embedded into the Rwandan economy, providing substantial financial buoyancy to the banking and construction sector, and its programmes are critical to protecting the welfare of citizens and providing citizens protections as they transition out of low productivity agriculture to higher productivity employment. However, the costs of sustaining RAMA, government’s social and health insurance scheme and currently one of Rwanda’s largest social welfare programmes, have been spiralling out of control, placing pressure on public finances that could undermine the sustainability of the social insurance programme.
This project seeks to directly deal with state level policy coordination and public financial management by looking at how best the government can manage a welfare scheme (critical for labour productivity) that is fiscally sustainable and responsive to the welfare concerns of formal workers in both the public and private sectors.
Currently, the RSSB does not have an institutional structure or document that defines the RAMA and how it will function, nor do they have elements that can help them manage and incentivise the performance of providers and the decisions of beneficiaries. This project aims to support the RSSB’s strategy which would help provide the infrastructure and foundation for a functioning system, with defined parameters and rules. The strategy would set the basis for other kinds of reforms on reimbursement levels and payment alternatives, the big incentives that drive the delivery of the RSSB’s health insurance scheme.
This project will also focus on improving RSSB’s administrative and beneficiary database to strengthen the RSSB’s service delivery in the context of the insurance scheme. With better data, the RSSB will be able to diagnose gaps in the current system, as well as to conduct research on the effectiveness of technological and behavioural interventions for increasing uptake of the scheme as well as addressing administrative challenges like fraud.