Rwanda Vision 2020

Vision 2020 is a framework for Rwanda's development, presenting the key priorities and providing Rwandans with a guiding tool for the future. It seeks to transform Rwanda into a middle-income country by the year 2020. This will require achieving annual per capita income of USD900 (USD290 today), a poverty rate of 30% (64% today) and an average life expectance of 55 years (49 years today).

The framework includes the rehabilitation and development of infrastructure as a crucial aspect in lowering the costs of doing business. It calls for: (i) a modern land law providing security of tenure and freedom of exchange; (ii) the development of alternative lower costs of transport to the sea; and (iii) increase of energy production and diversification into alternative energy sources. Rwanda has considerable hydroelectric potential, in addition to large deposits of renewable methane gas in Lake Kivu, estimated at 60bn m3. In rural areas direct solar energy or photovoltaic energy can be used, whilst up to 1/3 of 155m tons of peat deposit is currently exploitable. Rwanda projects that by 2020, at least 35% of the population will be connected to electricity (up from the current 6%).

Vision 2020 recognises sustainable environmental and climate change management as a cross-cutting pivotal area to the realisation of national aspirations. It recognises that the major problem in environmental protection is the imbalance between the population and the natural resources. This leads to alarming degradation observed through massive deforestation, the depletion of biodiversity, erosion and landslides, pollution of waterways and the degradation of fragile ecosystems.

To protect the environment against massive deforestation and soil destruction, Vision 2020 sets the target for the protection rate against erosion to rise from 20% in 2000 to 90% by year 2020. To ease the pressure on wood biomass seeing that 86.3% of the Rwandan population uses wood as the source of energy, Vision 2020 targets to drop the use of wood energy in national energy balance, to 50% by 2020 through diversification of energy sources availed to the population.