A Green Revolution for Rwanda? The Political Economy of Poverty and Agrarian Change

The World Development Report 2008 highlights the need for a green revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper reflects upon the visions and ambitions of Rwandan policy makers to make this happen. It first analyses the political economy of Rwanda in a historical perspective. It outlines how political evolutions and events – with special reference to 1994 – have brought to power a political élite whose identity (both ethnic and spatial) differs profoundly from that of the overall majority. The main part of the paper links the identity of the current political élite to its vision and ambitions to create and foster a “green revolution” in Rwanda. Based upon interviews conducted by the author in mid-2007, the paper illustrates the strong ambitions of national policy makers to re-engineer the traditional agricultural sector into a modernized vehicle for economic growth, with little place left for traditional smallholder agriculture. The paper points to the flaws and shortcomings in this strategy. In the final part, it draws conclusions from the Rwandan case to feed the wider debate on how political economy dynamics shape the chances for a successful green revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Rural Poverty and Livelihood Profiles in Post-genocide Rwanda

The paper aims to identify the different livelihood profiles that prevail in post-conflict rural Rwanda. By means of exploratory tools such as principal component and cluster analysis, it combines variables that capture natural, physical, human, financial and social resources in combination with environmental factors to identify household groups with different asset portfolios and varying livelihoods. The paper also explores how household groups differ with regards to the intra-cluster incidence of poverty. Finally, for a subsample, it looks in detail at how the identified household clusters perceive changes in their living conditions between 2001 and 2004. The paper concludes that “fighting poverty” can take very different forms for groups with different livelihood profiles.

Striving for growth, bypassing the poor? A critical review of Rwanda’s rural sector policies

This paper critically analyses the challenges and priorities for Rwanda’s rural sector policies in the fight against poverty. The lessons drawn are important, as this sector will be at the forefront of Rwanda’s new Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS or PRSP-2). The paper first looks at the dangers of the purely growth-led development focus in Rwanda’s PRSP-1 (implemented between 2002-2005), and evaluates the extent to which the agricultural sector has, indeed, been a pro-poor growth engine. It then studies the government’s current agricultural policies and looks at the recently adopted land law, both of which aim to modernize and ‘professionalize’ the rural sector. There is a high risk that policy measures in favour of a more professional and modern farm sector will be at the expense of the large mass of small-scale peasants. This paper stresses that the real challenge to transform the rural sector into a true pro-poor growth engine will be to value and incorporate the capacity and potential of small-scale ‘non-professional’ peasants into the core strategies for rural development. Rwandan policy makers and international donors should shift their focus away from a purely output-led logic towards distribution-oriented rural development policies. Striving for pro-poor growth requires reconciling output growth with equity, and perhaps even putting equity first.

The Aid 'Darlings' and 'Orphans' of the Great Lakes Region in Africa

In this paper we look at the developmental consequences of aid flows on the Great Lakes Region in Africa. The reshuffling of international relations after the end of the cold war has dramatically changed the exogenous influence of external actors on the agency of local and regional actors in the developing world. Our main hypothesis is however, that political considerations and donor coordination problems still play an important role in directing aid, although in a very different fashion compared to the cold war era. The region of the Great Lakes in Africa is a good illustration of the « darlings » versus « orphans » policy of official development assistance (ODA). Following a new selectivity principle, extensive structural aid is only allocated to those countries who exhibited a very particular form of “good governance” to which donors are sensitive, while “failed states” cannot qualify for structural ODA. This has led to the “aid darling” status of Rwanda and the “aid orphan” status of Zaire/DRCongo and Burundi. Our contention is that these choices have unduly inflicted high costs to these two latter countries and to the region. Since their economies are extremely aid dependent, the allocation of aid has a considerable impact on economic development as we try to show in this article. Departing somewhat from the dominant pessimist stance on the effectiveness of aid in Sub Sahara Africa we will try to show that overall, the costs of exclusion are detrimental for economic development and create regional and even international public ‘bads’ because of the spill-over effects of exclusion on the region.

The inverse relationship between farm size and productivity in rural Rwanda

The Rwandan government has recently adopted new agricultural and land policies that strive to increase productivity in the agricultural sector though land consolidation and concentration, and through the promotion of regional crop specialisation and monocropping. This paper, however, identifies the strong inverse relationship between farm size and land productivity under the current land management system; also when taking into account farm fragmentation, crop diversification, frequency of multicropping and household size. In addition, it concludes that increased farm fragmentation, higher frequency of multicropping, and more crop diversification do not necessarily have a significant negative impact upon productivity, on the contrary. The paper reflects upon the implications of Rwanda’s agrarian and land policies

Navigating research as a female ‘prostitute’ researcher

Female researchers’ work is often discredited within academic communities, especially in male-dominated fields such as security studies. But female researchers can also be undermined during fieldwork, where the role lies outside of local actors’ frame of reference for female professions. An Ansoms and Irène Bahati share personal experiences and outline the space needed to deal with the specific challenges women researchers face

The Rwandan agrarian and land sector modernisation:confronting macro performance with lived experiences on the ground

Rwanda has embarked on an ambitious policy package to modernise and professionalise the agrarian and land sector. Its reform fits into a broader call – supported by major international donors – to implement a Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa. After 10 years of implementation, there is increased production output and value-addition in commercialised commodity chains. These are promising results. However, poverty reduction, particularly in more recent years, seems limited. Moreover, micro-level evidence from the field calls into question the long-term sustainability of the agricultural and land sector reform. In this article, a group of researchers, having engaged in in-depth qualitative research in a variety of settings and over an extended period, bring together their main research results and combine their key findings to challenge the dominant discourse on Rwanda as a model for development

Statistics versus livelihoods: questioning Rwanda’s pathway out of poverty

Recent statistics indicate that poverty in Rwanda decreased impressively between 2006 and 2014. This seems to confirm Rwanda’s developmental progress. This article however argues for a more cautious interpretation of household survey data. The authors contrast macro-level statistical analysis with in-depth field research on livelihood conditions. Macro-economic numbers provide interesting information, however differentiated evidence is required to understand how poverty ‘works’ in everyday life. On the basis of the Rwandan case study, the authors conclude that because of the high political stakes of data collection and analysis, and given that relations of power influence the production of knowledge on poverty, cross-checking is crucial

Winning wars, building (illiberal) peace? The rise (and possible fall) of a victor’s peace in Rwanda and Sri Lanka

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Third World Quarterly on 25th September 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01436597.2015.1058150.© 2015 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com.The literature on peacebuilding dedicates very little space, empirically and theoretically, to countries that are emerging from a war waged to a decisive outcome. This review essay looks at Sri Lanka and Rwanda, two countries where a victorious leadership has led the process of post-conflict reconstruction, largely by employing illiberal means. It looks at the effect of decisive war on statebuilding and at the role of local agency and illiberal practices in a post-victory context. It concludes by assessing the global significance and long-term sustainability of post-victory illiberal statebuilding