Rwanda

The three areas of inter­ven­tion iden­ti­fied as pri­or­i­ties for renewed coop­er­a­tion are tech­ni­cal and voca­tion­al train­ing (TVET), the envi­ron­ment and sus­tain­able devel­op­ment and inclu­sive and inno­v­a­tive finance. Dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion, good gov­er­nance and gen­der equal­i­ty were iden­ti­fied as cross-cut­ting themes. The finan­cial enve­lope for Rwan­da is between EUR 10 and 12 mil­lion per year.

With a view to facil­i­tat­ing the resump­tion of bilat­er­al coop­er­a­tion, two del­e­gat­ed coop­er­a­tion projects began in 2023, with the Bel­gian devel­op­ment agency (Enabel) and the French devel­op­ment agency (AFD). Luxembourg’s Devel­op­ment Coop­er­a­tion is thus con­tribut­ing to the KWI­HAZA project (“Feed­ing the cities”), a project to devel­op agri­cul­tur­al val­ue chains co-financed by Lux­em­bourg and the Euro­pean Union (EU) and imple­ment­ed by Enabel, as well as the ​“Tech­ni­cal train­ing and employ­a­bil­i­ty sup­port project in Rwan­da”, a project to sup­port voca­tion­al train­ing cen­tres in Rwan­da, imple­ment­ed by AFD. Luxembourg’s Devel­op­ment Coop­er­a­tion also increased its ini­tial con­tri­bu­tion to the KWI­HAZA project by EUR 2 mil­lion in 2023, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to expand the ​“access to finance” com­po­nent of the project, which will be imple­ment­ed by the Lux­em­bour­gish NGO ADA. At the end of 2023, it also decid­ed to make a con­tri­bu­tion of EUR 3 mil­lion to a joint fund ini­ti­at­ed by the Ger­man and French devel­op­ment coop­er­a­tion agen­cies (KfW and AFD), enti­tled ​“Bas­ket Fund­ing for Pro-Poor Devel­op­ment”. The fund’s pri­ma­ry objec­tive is to fos­ter inclu­sive and sus­tain­able growth by improv­ing the qual­i­ty of local (social) ser­vices in both rur­al and disadvantaged 
areas of the coun­try. This will include the con­struc­tion of infra­struc­ture of ben­e­fit to vul­ner­a­ble pop­u­la­tions, such as water and san­i­ta­tion, health, cli­mate resilience and agri­cul­tur­al production.

In addi­tion, in 2023 Luxembourg’s Devel­op­ment Coop­er­a­tion finalised the for­mu­la­tion of KIFC, its first flag­ship project in Rwan­da. As part of the project for­mu­la­tion, a del­e­ga­tion from Lux­em­bourg com­posed of lead­ing Lux­em­bourg fig­ures in the inclu­sive finance ecosys­tem who will con­tribute to the project vis­it­ed Rwan­da in Sep­tem­ber 2023, to finalise the project’s tech­ni­cal and finan­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion with their Rwan­dan counterparts.

Final­ly, LuxDev was man­dat­ed in 2023 to for­mu­late two oth­er projects in the fields of voca­tion­al and tech­ni­cal train­ing (the Dig­i­tal Skills project) and sus­tain­able devel­op­ment (the EPAFLEC project). Imple­men­ta­tion of these projects is expect­ed to start in ear­ly 2024.