Against the odds: achieving the MDGs in Rwanda

In the last five years Rwanda has made dramatic development progress. There has been sustained economic growth and the signs of economic transformation noted in 2005 have been confirmed. There has been a continued growth in non-farm employment and a good performance in all economic sectors. There was an increase in non-farm employment and a consequence reduction in households’ reliance on agriculture for their income. Nevertheless by 2010/11 still over half of all households (55.9) relied on agriculture for their survival (Figure 1). Interestingly there was also a decrease in households dependent on non-agricultural income from 34.3 per cent to 27 per cent, driven by a decline in households dependent on non-farm self-employment, down by 10.8 percentage points. However, the latter was more than compensated for by the increase in households with diversified incomes, up from 3.3 per cent to 15.2 per cent - suggesting that there has been an increase in opportunities for farm and non-farm waged employment and that the number of households that are able to benefit from having income from more than one source of income has increased.