Rwanda poverty - search results

Supported by major international donors, the Rwandan government has lofty ambitions to modernise the agrarian and land sector. These reforms are part of a broader call to implement a Green Revolution across Africa. The authors of this blogpost insist on a more nuanced, in-depth and multi-faceted approach in order to understand the distance between centrally-planned policies and the realities of rural livelihoods.

Our latest blogpost on Rwanda’s development myths asks how can total GDP growth average between 6% and 8% annual growth, with incomes in the agricultural sector decreasing for a substantial proportion of farmers. Something is amiss in Rwanda’s GDP growth figures. How has the country managed to fake it for so many years?

In the latest exposé of Rwanda’s poverty statistics, our experts reveal the methodical faking of statistical evidence. Until now the working assumption had been that this was a methodological disagreement with the figures but in the end it turns out to be a simple, straightforward (and easy to prove) case of fake statistics. The only reason it has taken so long to prove the manipulation is that our experts had not imagined the possibility that Rwandan authorities might have misreported their own results. This blogpost includes the excel files which will allow everyone, including non-experts, to check the findings. This also means that it will be impossible for the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda and the World Bank to keep denying the evidence. Heads will have to roll.

Continuing our exposé of the Rwandan government’s subterfuge (and World Bank and IMF complicity) roape.net’s expert reveals what is really going on behind the...

After ten years working on the Review of African Political Economy’s website, Leo Zeilig reflects on the struggles, history and analysis that has been published on the platform. The website has proclaimed loudly for a radical agenda on the continent and has been resolute in supporting struggles of communities and working people fighting for justice and liberation.  As he steps away, Leo shares his reflections on ROAPE and the website.

In their piece, Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong discuss Ethiopia as a model for China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), contrasting positive Chinese engagement and infrastructure investment on the African continent with the West's negative media depictions and limited support, while highlighting Ethiopia's significant economic growth and industrialization.

After Voices for African Liberation: Conversations with the Review of African Political Economy, ROAPE is pleased to publish a new edited collection, Capitalism and Economic Crime in Africa: The Neoliberal Period. The volume brings together a collection of research articles, briefings and blog posts that were published over a period of nearly 40 years (1986–2023), in our journal and on our website. Here, the book's editor Jörg Wiegratz introduces the book, followed by Yusuf Serunkuma's foreword to the collection. Both Wiegratz and Serunkuma firmly locate economic crime in Africa within a global, neoliberal capitalist order that sustains accumulation in the global centres of power and wealth and reproduces dependency and underdevelopment on the continent.

In January 2024, Makerere University in Kampala hosted a two-day conference to reflect on 40 years of neoliberalism in Uganda. Writing on the conference, Serunkuma reminds us that, 40 years on, Uganda remains an epicentre of neoliberalism - or what he terms the 'new colonialism' in Africa. Consequently, neoliberalism and its many ills must remain at the forefront of scholarly and activist discussion and analysis.

Yusuf Serunkuma writes that Israeli’s occupation and murder of Palestinians in Gaza today is the British in Kenya, India, and Zimbabwe, Germany in Namibia, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam. Notions such a democracy, or the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights, have been exposed, once again, as a sham and a lie, revealing nothing but western self-interest–which captures neither our realty nor aspirations.

In this blog post, Yusuf Serunkuma draws a compelling comparison between Bobi Wine of Uganda and Fela Kuti of Nigeria, both of whom are recognized as among Africa's most creative artists and courageous political activists for their resistance against dictatorship. Serunkuma emphasises that despite the possibility that Bobi Wine's music and activism may have surpassed Fela Kuti's, he remains underappreciated by Western observers.