RWANDA POPULATION TO DOUBLE TO 16 MILLION BY 2020
Rwanda's population - set to double to 16 million by 2020 at its current growth rate of 3.2 percent per annum - will present a major challenge to the government, Finance and Economic Planning Minister Donald Kaberuka has said.
The government, he said, needed to raise the gross domestic product from the
current US $290 to $900 by 2020 if it is to cope with the increase in
people. "This is an ambitious agenda requiring a growth of 7 percent to 8
percent per annum, implying fairly high rates of savings in the coming
years," he told a conference reviewing the country's poverty reduction
strategies, the Rwanda News Agency reported.
Rwanda's population density was 250.7 per sq km in 1998, making it one of
the most crowded nations in the world. Kaberuka told delegates that to meet
development goals there must be good government, poverty reduction, prudent
management of the economy, people trained for a service-based economy and
implementation of a vigorous rural development policy. The nation's effort
to attain an 8-percent annual growth of the economy would fail, he said,
unless agriculture was transformed from the predominantly subsistence scale
to that of commercial production.
SOURCE: Rwanda News Agency via IRIN Africa English reports, 10 October 2001