At this point, the government had not heard of the RRA and was naturally skeptical of what it could do to help build its capacity to deliver basic services. But given its desire to get things moving, it agreed to conduct two small RRI pilots to assess the potential of this approach for tackling the challenges of implementing service delivery. In May 2006, a Steering Committee headed by the Second Vice-President was formed to decide in which areas to conduct the pilots and to provide political cover for their implementation. In late 2006, a decision was made to conduct two pilots, the first in the education sector and the second in the health sector.

In the first, one of the pressing concerns of the Ministry of Education (MOE) was the long delay in getting primary school textbooks to village schools, which typically took one year.<sup>12</sup> The Director General of Education proposed to conduct an RRI in the province of Bubanza and committed to the Steering Committee that her team would reduce this delay to within 100 days in the province. The team in fact successfully delivered 25,000 textbooks within 60 days, well within the 100-day target of the RRI. In the second, the Ministry of Health (MOH) successfully increased the number of HIV/AIDs screenings of pregnant women in the pilot health care center from an average of 71 per month to 482 in the first month, more than a six-fold increase.<sup>13</sup> While these pilots were miniscule in the whole scheme of things, they enabled the respective teams to learn what works and what does not in attaining key service delivery priorities, involving the complete chain of actors required for implementation – textbook delivery in the case of education and HIV/AIDs screening of pregnant women in the case of health. The pilots demonstrated solutions to overcome long-standing constraints to implementation in two priority sectors, jumpstarting results beyond expectations.

In May 2007, the MOE and the MOH presented the results of their pilots at a high-level government retreat attended by the President, the two Vice-Presidents, and the Cabinet and organized by the Steering Committee. The participants were astonished (and elated) that government ministries, which presumably had little or no capacity to get things done, successfully managed to tackle seemingly intractable problems. The Second Vice-President (VP2) proposed that these pilots be scaled up nationwide and that new RRIs be initiated in pressing service delivery areas. The President and the Cabinet endorsed the proposal and urged the Committee to proceed quickly. The scale-up of the pilots was now seen as achievable because the respective RRI teams were able to develop solutions to longstanding constraints that hindered implementation. They each learned how to address the “pain points” along the delivery chain and could now share this with colleagues in other provinces. Moreover, in the process of conducting the pilots, they learned team building and collaborative skills that were necessary to make an RRI work and could thus help advise other teams (not just in their respective ministries) in the use of an RRI.

> 12 In the context of the RRA, a reduction in the delay in delivering textbooks nationwide would constitute the project.  An intermediate outcome of this project would be reducing this delay to within 100 days in Bubanza.  An RRI is then launched to attain this intermediate outcome.

> 13 See World Bank Institute (2013).

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