Government is set to embark on a comprehensive assessment of the current social protection programmes to ascertain their impact on communities, and make necessary adjustments aimed at improving the livelihoods of more Rwandans.

Dr Alvera Mukabaramba, the Minister of State for Community Development and Social Affairs, announced this yesterday during a news briefing on the recently released Ubudehe Social stratification report.

The report indicates that over half of Rwandan families are perceived as well-off. These fall under Category Three of the scheme and comprise 53.7 per cent of all the households in the country–5.7 million people.

Category Four, which comprises those who are very rich including big farmers, successful business people and top employees in the public and private sectors, has 11,664 households, representing 0.5 per cent of the total households.

This category is comprised of people who dwell in Kicukiro, Nyarugenge, Gasabo and Rubavu districts.

Category Two — which is made up of those who own a house or able to rent one, can eat at least twice a day and can earn wages working for others often in non-permanent jobs – totals 703,461 households, representing 29.8 per cent.

However, the challenge lies within Category One, where the results reveal that 16 per cent of the total households in the country (376,192 households) live in extreme poverty without the ability to own or rent a house and often struggle to get food and basic items like soap. They total up to 1,480,167 people.

Despite various efforts to pull citizens out of poverty, through mechanisms such as, One Cow Per Family (Girinka), Hanga Umurimo, Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme (VUP), among others, experts say there is need for evaluation of some of these social protection programmes.

VUP is an integrated local development programme designed to accelerate poverty eradication, rural growth, which was introduced in 2007.

Speaking to journalists, Minister Mukabaramba, acknowledged that there is a need to revamp "some of the social protection programmes” for better results.

She stated that the government is assessing the results of the current programmes in relation to the latest economic challenges in the country.

"We have come to realise that there is a need to evaluate some of the social protection programmes. We are currently evaluating the implications of the available programmes, such as VUP, Girinka, among others—to see how they have made it possible to move the poor out of poverty, while developing other mechanisms to eradicate poverty,” she said.

Mukabaramba says government decided to introduce new social strata categorisation (Ubudehe) –reducing the categories from six to four in line with current social and economic situation in the country.

"Poverty is reducing significantly but we even need more efforts to pull those people who are within the 16 per cent of the population out of extreme poverty,”

Saidi Sibomana, the deputy director general of the Local Administrative Entities Development Agency (LODA), said social protection programmes will be enhanced to empower families in category one to independently engage in activities that would transform their lives.

The new programmes, according to Sibomana, should come into force "in three years time”, which will coincide with first review of the new Ubudehe categorisation programme.

The new Ubudehe Social Stratification, will be reviewed after every three years.

The new categorisation captured a total of 2,358,488 households (10,382,558 people) across the country’s four provinces and Kigali City and classified them into groups according to their degree of social and economic vulnerabilities.

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