Following the recent cabinet meeting that approved the strategy for sustainable graduation out of poverty, the dialogue was held on Thursday in Kigali with presence of different actors in social protection sector including Ministers, Governors, heads of government institutions, Development partners, UN agencies and CSOs implementing social protection and livelihood development programmes.

Minister Musabyimana underlined that addition to Rwanda Government’s heavy investment in social protection programmes and its significant achievements towards poverty reduction, the government is not satisfied with the rate at which poverty is reducing, compared to the rate of growth in other sectors.

The government has adopted this strategy in response to address these underlying challenges and embark on a multi sectoral approach to address them, and ensure that the development is inclusive building on the SDG principle of leaving no one behind.

Minister Musabyimana said: We strongly believe that eradicating poverty is possible and through this strategy and therefore we want to ensure that local economic development projects create jobs and increase incomes by creating small business and income generating activities.

He added that coordination and collaboration with other sectoral ministries and agencies to ensure that there is increased access to basic services such as agricultural inputs, access to education and health to ensure that barriers to socio-economic development are removed or minimised to better contribute to human capital development.

The policy dialogue on social protection and graduation strategy with the theme “towards an inclusive and sustainable graduation out of poverty”, discussed and deliberated on how to operationalize the recently adopted graduation strategy and noted that for graduation to happen, the package of services needs to be delivered on time, improved coordination and monitoring to enhance graduation outcome.

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