GDP tripled in two decades in a country rebuilt from genocide.
In 1994, Rwanda experienced a genocide that killed between 800,000 and 1.2 million people in approximately one hundred days.1 GDP declined by more than forty percent that year. The country's institutional, economic, and social infrastructure was destroyed.
Under President Paul Kagame, Rwanda launched Vision 2020 at the turn of the millennium, a strategic plan to rebuild the country and reach middle-income status.2 Between 2001 and 2015, real GDP growth averaged approximately eight percent annually.3 GDP per capita tripled from roughly $250 in the early 2000s to over $800 by 2018. Poverty fell from seventy-eight percent after the genocide to thirty-eight percent by 2017.
The World Bank's Doing Business index ranked Rwanda twenty-ninth in 2019, the only low-income country in the top thirty, ahead of France, Russia, and Spain.4 The Rwanda Development Board, formed in 2008, served as a one-stop shop for business regulations and foreign investment, overseeing more than two billion dollars in investments in 2018.
Vision 2050, launched in December 2020, set new targets: upper-middle-income status by 2035 and high-income status by 2050.5 Life expectancy, which had collapsed during the genocide, exceeded sixty-seven years by 2018, far above the average for countries at similar income levels. The transformation involved trade-offs, including restrictions on political pluralism and press freedom, that remain the subject of ongoing international debate.