Rwanda’s Vision 2050 is a bold development strategy aimed at propelling the country from low to high-income status, fostering sustainable development, and achieving a high quality of life for all Rwandans. The country has made significant economic progress in the past two decades.
To continue growing, Rwanda needs to transform the structure of its economy to respond to current challenges imposed by technological progress and climate change. Furthermore, Rwanda has to overcome the limits of its small domestic market and landlocked position and find its place in global and regional value chains.
Productive capacity development will play a pivotal role in achieving the economic and social objectives of Rwanda because it can foster structural transformation, diversification, and employment generation.
The potential of productive capacities has been already recognized by the government of Rwanda, but it can be allocated a more central and transversal role during the current revision of the national trade and industrial policies. This is necessary because Rwanda exhibits serious gaps in productive capacities. Underutilization of existing capacities is high and widespread, and the development of new ones is hampered by weak infrastructure, particularly information and communication technologies, energy, and transport.
To help address these challenges, the present report provides a coherent and operational strategy for enhancing productive capacities in Rwanda. The strategy prioritizes four policy areas – investment and technology, human and physical capital, private sector, and policy coherence and inclusiveness.
This Report is one of the main outputs of the 12th Tranche UN Development Account Project on "Coherent Strategies for Productive Capacity Development in African Least Developed Countries" which was launched in the first quarter of 2020 and is being implemented in Burkina Faso, Rwanda and Tanzania.
