Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy 2008-2012

Rwanda’s Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS) provides a medium term framework for achieving the country’s long term development aspirations as embodied in Rwanda Vision 2020, the seven year Government of Rwanda (GoR) programme, and the Millennium Development Goals.
The priorities of the strategy are embodied in three flagship programmes: (i) sustainable Growth for Jobs and Exports (ii) Vision 2020 Umurenge (iii) governance.
In order to eliminate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, the objectives of the EDPRS are to maximise preventative health measures and build the capacity to have high quality and accessible health care services for the entire population in order to reduce malnutrition, infant and child mortality, and fertility, as well as control communicable diseases. This includes strengthening institutional capacity, increasing the quantity and quality of human resources, ensuring that health care is accessible to all the population, increasing geographical accessibility. In addition, the Water and Sanitation Sector plans also to ensure sustainable and integrated water resources management and development for multipurpose use including increased access for all to safe water and sanitation services.
In order to make agriculture, forestry and fisheries more productive and sustainable, the main programmes of EDPRS include the intensification of sustainable production systems in crop cultivation and animal husbandry, building the technical and organisational capacity of farmers; promoting commodity chains and agribusiness, and strengthening the institutional framework of the sector at central and local level.
Regarding the reduction of rural poverty, EDPRS plans to accelerate the rate of poverty reduction by promoting pro-poor components of the national growth agenda. This will be achieved by releasing the productive capacity of the poor in rural areas through a combination of public works, promotion of cooperatives, credit packages and direct support. Furthermore, in education and skills development, the emphasis will be on increasing the coverage and the quality of nine year basic education, strengthening Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET), and improving the quality of tertiary education. In social protection, the objective is to achieve effective and sustainable social protection for the poor and vulnerable. The sector will provide social assistance to the most needy while supporting the able-bodied to progress out of extreme vulnerability and poverty into more sustainable means of self-support. Finally, special attention is also given, in the EDPRS, to the challenges and opportunities facing young people, in order to strengthen the youth’s participation in the social, economic and civic development of Rwanda.
To enable inclusive and efficient agricultural and food systems, the government will promote competitiveness and Private Sector development through capacity building initiatives, credit schemes and Business Development Service (BDS). In manufacturing, the GoR will promote value addition in existing product lines in agro-processing, including coffee and tea, handicrafts and mining, and development of new products including silk, pyrethrum, hides and skins and flowers. The GoR will also provide incentives for foreign direct investment and create industrial parks and export processing zones.
To increase the resilience of livelihood to disasters, the EDPRS contains an environmental and land priorities with involve ecosystems, the rehabilitation of degraded areas and strengthening newly established central and decentralised institutions. Special attention will be paid to sustainable land tenure security through the planning and management of land registration and rational land use, soil and water conservation, reforestation, preservation of biological diversity and adaptation and mitigation against the impact of climate change.
In the context of governance, The EDPRS mainstreams a system of monitoring and evaluation at national, sub national and sectoral levels to improve Public Sector performance. This document proposes an indicator system of four linked matrices which can be used by domestic stakeholders to monitor national development (the EDPRS), by external stakeholders to exercise accountability for grants and loans (Performance Assessment and Policy Matrix), and, to a limited extent, by sector specialists to track performance over a rolling three year budget period (the Medium Term Expenditure Framework).