Multidimensional Child Poverty in Rwanda 2018
A Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA)
Highlights
Rwanda has achieved remarkable progress in reducing poverty over the past decades. Since 2000, the monetary poverty rate has fallen from nearly 59 per cent to under 40 per cent, with extreme poverty dropping from 40 per cent to 16 per cent. Despite these impressive gains, poverty still affects two out every five Rwandans.
Multidimensional child poverty analysis is an important tool to evaluate the impact of a government’s poverty agenda. Assessing the current challenges from a child’s point of view offers important insights on the nature of poverty in Rwanda – who the poor are, why their poverty persists, and how poverty is inter-generationally transmitted. The year 2017 has been an opportune moment for reflection: Rwanda outperformed most of its African peers in terms of delivering on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) but the country must now focus on a much more challenging set of development goals – the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Understanding the current context of child poverty and establishing the baselines to assess progress are indispensable to achieving the 2030 targets. The upcoming National Strategy for Transformation places emphasis on poverty reduction under the pillars of Economic and Social Transformation – with a target of eradicating extreme poverty by 2024.
