The Government of Rwanda has adopted a Five-year National Strategy for Community and Local Economic Development (LED) 2013-2018. The ultimate aim of this strategy for LED is to provide LGs with the necessary tools to create the business enabling environment that each district needs in order to achieve Local Economic Development, eradicate poverty and create jobs.

To this end, LODA will launch a new enterprise development fund called Local Competitiveness Facility (LCF). LCF will initially be piloted in 4 Districts with the objective of duplicating it in the other Districts.

The existing management information system of LODA – which is called MEIS (Monitoring & Evaluation Information System) - is extended to support the relevant business process of the LCF programme in the information system. This includes uploading of project proposals by the applicants, a four-stage evaluation process with different criteria for each stage (Expression of Interest, Full Project Proposal, Due Diligence and Investment Committee) and level (District, LODA, External Consultant and LCF Fund Manager), divided into a technical and administrative evaluation. After each stage, the applicant receives automated feedback by e-mail with individual evaluation results. The LCF module in MEIS can be individually configured with flexible evaluation criteria. A security framework is available that allows only authorized users to access the online evaluation depending on the stage, level and type (technical or administrative).