Rwanda: Enabling Policies for Livestock Brief

The Government of Rwanda (GoR) has allocated significant resources to improve agricultural productivity, expand the livestock sector, and promote sustainable land management. As a result, the agriculture sector grew an average of 5% per year between 2002 and 2012, although this growth rate is still below the government's objective of 8-9% annual growth and the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) commitment of 6% growth. The GoR has articulated various national and sectoral policy documents that outline the overall livestock subsector development strategies. These policies include Vision 2020, the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS), the Strategy and Action Plan for Food Security, the National Agricultural Policy (NAP), and the Strategic Plan for Agricultural Transformation (PSTA III). Vision 2020 sets the country on a course to become a middle-income country by the year 2020, with the livestock sector supporting each of the six pillars and three cross-cutting themes of the national vision. The national vision is further laid out in the Second Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (EDPRS II), which considers agriculture as a key sector for economic growth. EDPRS emphasizes the intensification of sustainable production systems in crop cultivation and animal husbandry, building the technical and organizational capacity of farmers, promoting commodity chains and agribusiness, and strengthening the institutional framework of the agricultural sector at the national and local levels. The NAP considers mixed crop and livestock farming as a national priority in all regions, while PSTA III is a five-year program from 2013 to 2018 with two main objectives: transforming the agriculture sector to enhance food security and reduce poverty, and expanding the private sector role in production, processing, and value addition and commercialization of staple crops, export commodities, and livestock products. The GoR has also implemented various policies and programs to achieve a national agricultural transformation, including the National Agricultural Extension Strategy (NAES) and the Agricultural Mechanization Strategy (AMS). NAES aims to create an optimal environment to promote exchange and dissemination of information among stakeholders in order to facilitate transformation and modernization of agriculture, while AMS focuses on mechanization along the value chain to ensure better quality, value, marketability, and profitability of farm products. Additionally, the GoR has implemented programs such as the Girinka program, the Umuturu Community Resource and Infrastructure Development Project, the Purchase for Progress initiative, and the Millennium Village Project to contribute to the realization of PSTA, EDPRS, and Vision 2020. The livestock sector policies in Rwanda are designed to achieve a national agricultural transformation, with a focus on animal resource intensification, research technology transfer, and organization of farmers, private sector-driven value chain development and expanded investments, and institutional results-focused development and agricultural crosscutting initiatives. The PSTA III initiative has strong ties with Vision 2020, EDPRS II, and the CAADP II via similar objectives, strategic impacts, and outcomes, as well as corresponding targets, and has a strong market orientation. The initiative aims to achieve a number of target results, including doubling milk consumption over the course of five years through the "One cup of milk per child" program development of dairy market, quality improvement in the milk value chain, and continued coordination in the dairy subsector of the livestock industry. The One-cow (Girinka) project is one of the projects under the animal resource development program of the PSTA initiative, which began in 2006 to reduce poverty and increase rural household income through livestock asset transfers. Since the inception of the program, 134,548 cows have been distributed among poor families, while 40,352 cows obtained from offspring of the initial stock have been passed on to other poor families. The program has led to an increase in milk production, higher household income, and reduction in the level of poverty among rural households.