From urban catastrophe to 'model' city?: politics, security and development in post-conflict Kigali

In the years immediately after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Kigali was a site of continuing crisis amid extraordinary levels of urban population growth, as refugees returned to Rwanda in their millions. Yet unlike many post-conflict cities that spiral into endemic crime and instability, it was rapidly securitised in the context of political consolidation and large amounts of foreign aid, and hailed by the UN as a ‘model, modern city’. This paper analyses the government’s approach to securitising Kigali, interrogating how its rapid trajectory from epicentre of conflict to carefully planned showcase for development has been achieved. It is argued that Kigali bears the weight of many of Rwanda’s development aspirations and keeping it secure and orderly is viewed as critical by the government. After examining the national and local processes through which the government has aimed to achieve ‘secure urbanisation’, the potential longer-term implications of its urban development strategy are considered

Stakeholder Perceptions on Graduation in Ethiopia and Rwanda

The Food Security Programme in Ethiopia and the Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme in Rwanda deliver a combination of consumption support (cash or food transfers, Public Works employment) and livelihood support (asset packages, microfinance) with the objective of ‘graduating’ rural households out of food insecurity and poverty into self?reliant livelihoods. This article presents perspectives on graduation of influential stakeholders in Ethiopia and Rwanda, and draws conclusions from these case studies for global graduation debates. Our qualitative research reveals a diversity of opinions about the complexity of factors that enable or constrain sustainable graduation. These relate partly to programme design, but also to implementation issues and the different national and subnational economic, political and agroecological contexts within which programmes operate. The alignment of graduation with broader development goals makes investment in these programmes attractive to donors as well as governments, but risks introducing excessive political pressure to demonstrate ‘success’

Challenges of Measuring Graduation in Rwanda

Rwanda demonstrates how a process of community consultation and participation is able to identify and rank community members according to ‘social poverty’, drawing on the Ubudehe tradition which is considered a strength of Rwanda's social fabric. However, with the Ubudehe categorisation now the basis for determining eligibility to a range of social benefits, the process has come under some strain. This article highlights two issues related to targeting and graduation: (1) the difficulty in identifying the poor/non?poor and ranking the population using community participatory techniques; and (2) the sensitivity of eligibility criteria and graduation thresholds to different targeting modalities. Our primary interest is to establish whether improvements for identifying the poor and non?poor can be made without undermining community ownership and what these improvements would look like. This will be useful for policymakers in Rwanda as the new five?year development strategy places importance on graduating households out of extreme poverty