No more poverty! The target of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is very ambitious. And yet, despite great efforts and progress made on the reduction of poverty worldwide, achievement of the 2030 UN target is still far away. Over the past three decades, the poverty rate has dropped by 10 percentage points every 10 years, from more than 40% in the early 1980s to 10% in the mid-2010s. 

Rwanda is one contributor to this poverty reduction: the country’s poverty rate reduced from 56.7% in 2005/06 to 44.9% in 2010/11 and 39.1% in 2013/14 (NISR, 2015). If we want to continue to reduce poverty in Rwanda, we have to look at the determinants of poverty in the country and generate new ways to tackle it, as well as continuing along existing paths, where appropriate. Identifying the determinants of poverty will help us to fight poverty in a sustainable way.

Authors: Institute of Policy Analysis and Research (IPAR-Rwanda)

Download the paper here. 

This study is part of the project Understanding and supporting sustained pathways out of extreme poverty and deprivation.