The experience with the pilots ushered a “mindset change” among the Cabinet. The Council of Ministers was also highly supportive of this program and the Second Vice-President became the champion for its continuation and expansion. Even more concretely, in his closing statement at the retreat, the President communicated an unanticipated enthusiasm for extending the approach to additional line ministries and in cross-cutting areas: “In light of the results from pilot experiences using Rapid Results in health and in education in Bubanza, we recommend the application and the scale-up of the approach in all sectors of national life and at all levels of decision-making... the approach will become a tool for programming, monitoring and evaluation, on a regular basis, the actions of the government”.<sup>14</sup> Immediately thereafter, the Steering Committee communicated the results of the pilots widely across various ministries of the public sector and engaged the line ministries in selecting five officials from each relevant ministry to participate in a training that would enable them to apply the RRA to address constraints in their respective service delivery problems. Eight ministries then launched corresponding RRIs.

One particularly instructive initiative was launched by the Ministry of the Civil Service (MCS) in late 2007. A gnawing problem the Ministry faced then was in getting newly minted civil servants their first paycheck, i.e. de facto getting them into the public sector payroll. The problem was particularly acute for newly recruited primary school teachers – it took approximately a year on average for them to receive their very first paycheck. This led to a host of problems including absenteeism, as the teachers had to constantly come to the provincial capital and the capital city to follow up on “getting into the payroll”, and corruption, as many had to bribe education officials to facilitate the process. The Ministry launched an RRI covering six remote provinces in September 2007 and the DG of Civil service, supported by her Minister, made a public commitment to reduce the payment delay in these provinces to 90 days. This was considered a bold initiative and many in the Cabinet had doubts that the MCS could attain this stretch result. To their surprise, the MCS did accomplish the feat<sup>15</sup> , as attested by the Minister of Civil Service, Ms. Annonciata Sendazirasa speaking in 2010: “There was a time in the civil service when new teachers did not receive their first pay-checks and worked unpaid until between eight months to one year after beginning work. Sometimes we received incomplete files from the relevant ministry and sometimes we did not receive a file at all. Now we have devised a system that ensures they are paid within two months”. Because teachers comprised about half the civil service, this had an enormous impact. The RRI helped the MCS identify the “pain points” and build capacity of a core team in implementing an RRI. With this increased knowledge and capacity, the MCS was then able to design a system to address this problem not just for all new teachers but also for other newly minted civil servants<sup>16</sup> to receive payment within 60 days.

With the confidence, knowledge, and capacity built up by the success of the “payroll” initiative, the MCS launched two RRIs in October 2008 to reduce the number of fictitious staff within the Civil Service: supporting the completion of the census of civil servants and distributing 43,000 cards – one for

> 14 President Pierre Nkurunziza, 4th May 2007, Closing remarks of Government Retreat, Bujumbura 15 World Bank (2008). 16 Kazoviyo and Nyaburerwa (2011)

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