Rwanda, one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, needs to distribute its wealth better to lift and protect rural populations still living below the poverty line, a UN rapporteur on extreme poverty said Friday.
Rwanda’s rapid economic growth since the 1994 Tutsi genocide, which claimed around 800,000 lives, has been described as a “miracle.”
However, much of that expansion is concentrated in the capital, Kigali, which alone contributes 41 percent of the country’s GDP, according to government data.
The World Bank recently observed that Rwanda, whose GDP grew by 8.9 percent in 2024, faces a major challenge of “inclusiveness of growth,” noting major development tend to favour “more educated workers.”
“Rwanda has made remarkable strides in reducing poverty, lifting approximately 1.5 million Rwandans out of poverty in just seven years between 2017-2024,” Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights said in a statement.
Schutter, however, said Kigali faces the challenge of reaching some 3.6 million people still living below the poverty line, most of them in rural areas.
“Poverty is very much a rural phenomenon, with 80 percent of Rwandans in poverty living in rural areas,” he told AFP.