Rwandan Life Fact Sheet

Since 1994, Rwanda’s “life expectancy has doubled” and child mortality has fallen by more than two-thirds.
Rwanda, which is roughly the size of Vermont, has a population of nearly thirteen million people; yet it has seen just ten thousand cases of Covid-19 and fewer than two hundred deaths.
One of Rwanda’s Covid-19 strategies is called “pooled testing”. It involves making the most of scarce testing materials by “testing batches of samples from groups of people”. Individuals are tested only if a certain batch comes back positive for COVID-19.

Rwanda’s constitution was adopted in May 2003. It explicitly banned the politicisation of race, ethnic group, tribe, clan, region, sex or religion, and states that political organisations must always reflect the ‘unity of Rwandans’.
In 2000, Rwanda adopted the National Decentralization Policy—a people-focused policy that uses grassroots networks and local governments to help lessen shocks on households and alleviate poverty.
Rwanda is a presidential constitutional republic. The executive branch is led by the President of Rwanda – the head of state. Its legislative branch consists of 80 representatives in the Chamber of Deputies, and 26 Senators. The judiciary is independent from the government.
Currently, parliamentary, local and presidential elections are held separately every five years. The next elections will be the 2021 local elections, the 2023 parliamentary elections and the 2024 Presidential elections.

Rwanda has been described as Africa’s Singapore, because of the rate at which its economy has grown in recent years.
Rwanda’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has risen from $752 million in 1994 to $9.5 billion in 2018, and the GDP per capita has grown from $125.5 to $787 during the same period.
The country registered an average GDP growth of around 8 percent per year over the last two decades.
The sustained economic growth has led to one million people being lifted out of poverty (between 2000 and 2017) while life expectancy has risen from 29 years in 1994 to 69 years in 2020.
In 2009, the country ranked 143rd in the World Bank’s Doing Business report; by 2019, Rwanda sat 29th on the list, ahead of Spain, Russia and France.