ReGenerate Rwanda

General

Western and Southern Rwanda are the poorest parts of the country – 58% of all households in the Southern Province and 49% in the Western Province fall into the poorest and poor categories (compared to 40% overall for Rwanda) 1 . While poverty rates across the country have declined in recent years, in these provinces they have increased, with extreme poverty rising in the Southern province, while the number of poor households in the West has grown. Food insecurity similarly affects these two provinces to a greater degree than the rest of Rwanda – 29.9% of households in the Western Province, and 20.5% in the Southern Province are food-insecure, compared to a national average of 18.7%2 . The districts of Karongi, Nyamasheke, and Nyamagabe are among the ten poorest in Rwanda. A combination of factors keeps people living in poverty, including the acute land shortage and an underdeveloped non-farm economy3 , all leading to a reliance on casual agricultural labor and widespread unand underemployment, with farming being the main livelihood in Western and Southern Provinces

Objectives

The goal of ReGenerate Rwanda is to sustainably increase incomes for 30,000 women, youth, and men living in poverty in Western and Southern Rwanda. Using a market systems development approach, this five-year program aims to identify, catalyze, and scale up systemic solutions to reduce poverty, advance gender equality, regenerate the environment, and increase resilience. ReGenerate Rwanda will take a gender-transformative and regenerative business approach, prioritizing young and adult women as the primary target group (representing 20,000 of the 30,000 poor people this program will benefit) and promoting nature-positive economic opportunities that will benefit our target population and the environment and natural landscapes that sustain them. By the end of the program, ReGenerate Rwanda aims to have catalyzed systemic changes in the target market systems that lead to increased and diversified nature-positive incomes, increased household assets, increased off-farm employment, and improved gender norms and attitudes

Target Groups

The target group of 30,000 will be comprised of poor women (at least 20,000), youth, and men in the poorer Ubudehe C and D48 household categories (i.e., with an aggregated monthly household income of up to RWF 65,000 (approx. USD 63) and land ownership of up to 1ha).