WB approves $70m for Rwanda
2008-02-29 14:18
Kigali - The World Bank has approved a $70m grant to help Rwanda finance poverty reduction programmes under a new five-year growth strategy, says the bank.
In 2007, Rwanda launched an Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS) that it hoped to implement between 2008 and 2012.
The programme sets guidelines for a move towards a middle-income state by training its human resource, transforming the agricultural sector, investing in infrastructure and widening its export base.
Fourteen years after Rwanda's genocide of 800 000 people, the country remained one of the world's poorest with more than half of its population living on less than a dollar per day.
Rwanda hopes to cut poverty levels
The $70m grant was the fourth in a series linked to Rwanda's poverty reduction strategies that had been running since 2002, the World Bank said.
"The Fourth Poverty Reduction Support Grant ... aims at supporting measures to ease the infrastructure constraints to growth and build the human capital and skills base required to transform the economy to be export based and service oriented," the bank said in a statement.
Rwanda hoped to cut poverty levels from a current 56.9% to 46% by 2012, which remained far below the 34.7% target set under Millennium Development Goals.
The small central African nation needed some 5.1 trillion Rwandan francs to spend over the next five years as it implements its new strategy.
Rwanda had said its economy would grow by 7.1 in 2008 driven by continued growth of the service and industrial sector.