During the last seven years, we implemented a £1.5 million International Development assistance project in the southern and western provinces of Rwanda. The project, implemented in partnership with Urwego bank, was financed by the Scottish Government’s International Development initiative. The title of the project was “Improving Livelihoods in Rural Rwanda” and, gladly, this is precisely what the activities achieved.
The direct beneficiaries were 15,000 smallholder farmers working in agricultural cooperatives and 4,000 micro entrepreneurs organised in village savings and loans associations (VSLAs). They were provided with access to loans and other formal financial services, and training in financial literacy and good agricultural practises. Access to financial services by populations living in rural areas was substantially increased through the recruitment and training of 180 banking agents. From a project management point of view, this initiative was an unmitigated success: all the targets set out at project development stage were exceeded, at times by a large margin.
Well over 80% of the households interviewed were adamant that the project activities led to a substantial increase in the family income, which allowed families to send the children to school, afford health insurance, and acquire much needed household items. A particularly interesting finding of the evaluations was that beneficiaries praised training as much as, and in some cases even more than, access to credit.
Nikuze Athanasie is a maize farmer who was one of the beneficiaries of the project. After receiving training and access to a loan, Nikuze was able to increase her yield and make a profit, with which she was able to build a house with electricity running to it.
Another crucially important impact was the number of jobs created through accessing loans. Surveys and interviews with hundreds of beneficiaries indicated that the number of temporary jobs created by each loan taker was between 30 and 40, far more than the programme had initially envisioned. This shows that the interventions directly targeting 19,000 beneficiaries ended up having an impact on hundreds of thousands of Rwandans living in impoverished rural areas. It is clear that this seven-year project will have a long-lasting impact.
The only area in which the project struggled at the beginning was youth inclusion. People in the 18 to 34 year range are notoriously difficult to reach with development interventions. Young people are often not willing to engage in hard agricultural work and therefore tend to be severely underrepresented among agricultural cooperative members. Older members of VSLAs also tend to look down on young people, not trusting them to repay the loans. To tackle this difficult problem, OIUK partnered with CARE Rwanda and devised a project aimed at the creation of savings and loans groups especially for young people. CARE helped form 200 groups and, when the groups were ready to function, would pass on the 50 best performing ones to Urwego bank for the provision of loans. In the space of only three years, this subproject went beyond the most optimistic expectations. At the end of March 2024, over 200 youth savings and loans associations, comprised of well over 2,000 young people, were created and had gone on to accessing formal financial services from Urwego bank. This subproject was found to be not only an unmitigated success in terms of outcomes, but also a source of examples of best practises useful for the entire International Development sector.
Mujawimana is a maize and rice farmer who with the support from this project was able to increase her yield, giving her the funds to start building a house.
Looking ahead, it is clear that the seven-year project funded by the Scottish Government will be sustainable. Our partner, Urwego bank, has become a true pillar of the microfinance sector in Rwanda. Its operations and reach in rural areas has been steadily increasing over time and its granular and extensive network of agricultural and loan officers enabled the bank to function even at times when, because of the restrictions of the COVID pandemic, movements were severely restricted.
It has been a privilege to work on this project as project manager. Working alongside an in-country partner organisation of the utmost professionalism. This helped enormously in readjusting goals and objectives as the project continued to overperform. My counterparts in the Scottish Government were very supportive and always offered useful advice. Very importantly, they also showed considerable flexibility: they repeatedly agreed to reprofiling of budget lines when we suggested it, and welcomed and actively supported the parallel YSLA project.