Women Rise in Rwanda's Economic Revival

Women's Work

Female entrepreneurs in Maraba built thriving coffee farms and other successful businesses as society transformed in the wake of Rwanda's genocide. (Video By Travis Fox -- washingtonpost.com)

The evidence has been building for years. In 1990, a major study on poverty in Brazil published in the Journal of Human Resources showed that the effect of money managed by women in poor households was 20 times more likely to be spent on improving conditions in the home than money managed by men.

In Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank founded by 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has focused its poverty-busting microloans on women, with success rates far higher for female than for male borrowers. Microloan programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America have shown similar results.

In India's great economic transformation of the past 15 years, states that have the highest percentage of women in the labor force have grown the fastest as well as had the largest reductions in poverty, according to the World Bank.

"We have overwhelming evidence from almost all the developing regions of the world that [investment in] women make better economics," said Winnie Byanyima, director of the United Nations Development Program's gender team.

Born of Tragedy

For the worst of reasons, Rwanda became a testing ground for such theories after the 1994 genocide.

The slaughter of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus by Hutu militias, and the ensuing retributions, left Rwanda with a population that was 60 percent female and 40 percent male by the time the dead were buried. With thousands more men jailed for war crimes or living as refugees in neighboring Congo, women, at first by default, took on roles in business and politics. Although women had long enjoyed a relatively higher social status in Rwanda than in some other African nations, women here still had weak property rights, and female entrepreneurs were rare.

That would change rapidly -- particularly in agriculture, where many women were forced to take over farms. They found an ally in the barrage of foreign organizations that rushed into Rwanda following the genocide, with much of their focus aimed at training women.

As important was an acceptance at the highest levels of government that women would need new legal status to help rebuild the nation. By 1999, reforms were passed enabling women to inherit property -- something that would prove vitally important to female farmers. At the same time, woman began rising to higher ranks of political power. Today women hold about 48 percent of the seats in Rwanda's parliament, the highest percentage in the world. They also account for 36 percent of President Paul Kagame's cabinet, holding the top jobs in the ministries of commerce, agriculture, infrastructure, foreign affairs and information.

Success in economics mirrored the rise of women in politics. Today, 41 percent of Rwandan businesses are owned by women -- compared for instance with 18 percent in Congo. Rwanda has the second-highest ratio of female entrepreneurs in Africa, behind Ghana with 44 percent, according to the World Bank.

At the same time, Rwanda has engineered a surprisingly fast economic recovery. After falling into devastation in 1994, with many farms and businesses abandoned, damaged or destroyed, Rwanda's economy has since tripled in size and has grown at an average rate of 6 percent since 2004. Though the population is balancing out -- women edge men by a rate of 52 to 48 -- women make up 55 percent of the workforce, according to Commerce Minister Monique Nsanzabaganwa.

The ranks of female entrepreneurs were aided in part by returnees, largely from Uganda and the United States. Joy Ndungutse, 51, returned in the 1990s after working for years as a secretary in Washington. "We came back to a country destroyed," said Ndungutse, who since her return has built the largest nonagricultural export business in Rwanda. Her firm sells finely woven baskets to Macy's. Like many exporters here, she has been greatly aided by a trade agreement that allows her exports to enter the United States duty-free.

"Women are being given an opportunity in this country to change their status," she said, "and they are taking it."