Thesis:

Poverty Reduction Programmes And Enterprise Development In Rwanda : A Case Study Of Ubudehe Poverty Reduction Scheme

Different attempts have made by different stakeholders on issue of poverty alleviation. It is certain that various trials which are currently being applied to address poverty problems by scholars and government leaders are still lucking. A number of poverty reduction strategies/ Programmes have been set up in Rwanda which includes The United Nations Development Programme, Ubudehe among others to help address the poverty situation. Ubudehe is the key process for developing local-level capacity for collective action and participatory development planning. This study aimed at investigating the role of Poverty alleviation Programmes towards enterprise development in Rwanda, using a case study of the Ubudehe scheme. There was need to know how many beneficiaries of the poverty alleviation Programmes have set up own business enterprises whether large-scale or small scale, knowing this will help know if the government or NGOs need to encourage these people to invest partly their money in business as a means of further developing the economy. A combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods was used to achieve this objective. Data was collected using various tools namely: Questionnaires, Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) and interviews with different people passively or actively involved in these poverty reduction Programmes. The research finding showed that there has been a decrease in poverty levels from 54% shown by previous studies to 53.1%. There is a decrease gap between those considered poor and rich in the different categories. The study also established that a total of 30.6% of the 98 people an increase from 17% from previous studies and of the 30.6%, 19.4% are people who opened up shops and 11.2% were farm product sellers, these were all small scale enterprise and none was large scale. However, despite the level of poverty reducing, the percentages of those under poverty still remain relatively higher (53.1%). Due to limited scope, the overall impact of the increase in enterprise sector on the overall national enterprise development was not assessed.