Traditions That Deliver: Harnessing Cultural Practices Towards Education Delivery in Rwanda

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The International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity (the Education Commission) was established in 2015 to reinvigorate the case for investing in youth education. The Education Commission engaged a team from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) to build evidence on the “delivery approach” to education reform. The delivery approach is a set of ideas that aims to achieve rapid results at scale by overcoming barriers to implementation that has been carried out in various country contexts, including Rwanda, the focus of this case study.

Our research finds that the delivery approach has the potential to flourish in Rwanda. Indeed, the government’s push to reinvigorate traditional practices and harness them toward public-service delivery attests to the ways in which cultural norms can be adapted to modern development strategies. In this regard, the flexibility of the delivery approach within diverse country contexts proves one of its great strengths. Delivery principles manifest in various manners and to various effects, adjusting to cultural institutions as readily as they shape them.