Striving for growth, bypassing the poor? A critical review of Rwanda's rural sector policies
- 31 January 2008
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in The Journal of Modern African Studies
- Vol. 46 (1), 1-32
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x07003059
Abstract
Equity is complementary to the pursuit of long-term prosperity. Greater equity is doubly good for poverty reduction. It tends to favour sustained overall development, and it delivers increased opportunities to the poorest groups in a society. (François Bourguignon, speech at the launching of the World Development Report, 2006)This paper studies the Rwandan case to address some of the challenges and pitfalls in defining pro-poor strategies. The paper first looks at the danger of a purely growth-led development focus (as in Rwanda's first PRSP), and evaluates the extent to which the agricultural sector has been a pro-poor growth engine. It then studies Rwanda's current rural policies, which aim to modernise and ‘professionalise’ the rural sector. There is a high risk that these rural policy measures 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. The lessons drawn from the Rwandan case should inspire policy makers and international donors worldwide to shift their focus away from a purely output-led logic towards distribution-oriented rural development policies. In other words, the challenge is to reconcile efficiency in creating economic growth with equity, and perhaps, to put equity first.Keywords
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