In September 2015, the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR) released findings of the level of poverty based on findings of EICV 4.
NISR has finalized a standard follow up analysis to complement the earlier findings by establishing and examining the robustness of poverty trends between 2011 and 2014 as was planned.
Findings:
This analysisis which involves re-analyzing the previous survey in 2011 using the 2014 povert line shows that poverty reduced by 6.9% between 2011 and 2014; a reduction of 2.3% out of poverty per year (about 250,000 people).
It turns out that the key conclusion- that poverty reduced substantially between 2010/11 and 2013/14 - is robus:
1. It holds true both when poverty is measured directly and when it is estimated indirectly with a regression model,
2. It holds true for a wide range of food baskets and poverty lines. For any reasonable poverty line for that matter, poverty in Rwanda had to reduce between 2011 and 2014,
3. And it holds true for the panel of households who were surveyed and tracked both in 2010/11 and 2013/14.
Other important findings include:
The findings confirm that growth between 2011 and 2014 was pro poor, the poorest of the population enjoyed quite high consumption growth compared to the wealthier population.
In this regard, close to 60% of povert reduction was due to growth while close to 40% was due to redistribution from wealthy to poorer households.
Also while overall poverty reduced; 17.4% of households that were poor in 2011 were not poor in 2014 (they moved out of poverty) and 10.4% that were not poor in 2011 become poor in 2014 (dropped into poverty).
Policy implications:
Much as there are policies that help people to move out of poverty, we need other policies that help people stay out of poverty especially in difficult times due to several reasons like: illness, loss of family members, poor harvets due to draoughts or floods and many others.
For moore details, please download the full report here.
Done at Kigali, 29th June 2016
MURANGWA Yusuf
(SE)
Director General