By Christophe Hitayezu

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Parliament has given Prime Minister Édouard Ngirente six months to craft a strategy that will support the country’s border communities to access basic services.

Specifically, Members of Parliament want the government to fast-track setting up of services to facilitate border communities including on the Uganda/Rwanda and Burundi /Rwanda borders which were closed due to political tensions between countries.

While all Rwanda’s land borders remain closed to movement of people due to the coronavirus pandemic, the borders of Uganda/Rwanda and Burundi/Rwanda have been closed for over a year amid political tensions.

This has affected border communities that used to cross to access healthcare, attend schools, conduct business and visit family and friends many share common social relations.

"There are even people that cross borders to look for fodder in neighbouring countries like residents,” said Ms Edda Mukabagwiza, the Deputy Speaker in charge of Government Oversight and Legislation on Monday while presenting the parliamentary Outreach report.

Between November 2 and 8, MPs conducted a countrywide outreach to assess different government programmes implementation and citizen satisfaction in health, education, technology and telecommunication service provision.

They assessed how people living closer to border access government services to deter them from crossing borders for the services in neighbouring countries.

“Telecommunication infrastructures are not sufficiently distributed around the borders for the people to communicate, which causes interferences and poor connectivity,” Ms Mukabagwiza presented to the plenary.

“Network coverage is not only for people around the borders, even in previous outreach, we have exposed this problem. Schools with no connection, reporting that requires workers at health facilities for example relocate searching for network. This delays the service delivery,” Ms Marie Therese Murekatete, Member of the Parliament said in the plenary.