Reducing poverty is at the heart of development in Rwanda. As the world moves into anew millennium, with successes in global development, there is a need to provide a solid foundation for intensifying the attack on world poverty.

According to United Nations, about 25,000 people today die every day of hunger-related causes. This means that in every three and a half seconds, one person dies of hunger in a certain part of the world.

This misfortune continues and yet there is plenty of food in the world for every one. The problem is that hungry people are trapped in severe poverty.

Just because people lack the money to buy enough food to nourish themselves and their families, this has caused many people becoming weak and often sick because they are constantly malnourished.

If no change is made, this will make them increasingly less able to work, which will in turn make them even poorer and hungrier. This in certainty leads to the downward spiral that will often continue until the death of the victim and their families.

According to World Food Programme, Rwanda has had less than normal harvest in the month of August 2007. This poor harvest has led to insufficient food security in the Crete of the Nile, southern plateau and some districts in the Eastern Curve food economy zones.

Food prices are the highest recorded in recent years. Vulnerable households are struggling to cope through various ways including consumption of seed stock, skipping meals and abandoning school.

Lack of seeds and reduced availability of cassava cuttings may lead to inadequate planting and reduced crop production for season 2008.

As things go on, the last 54 years have been a period of global economic growth propelled by international partnership and interdependence. Many developing countries have started to participate in this growth and prosperity.

In the 1990s, for the first time, growth in the developing world outpaced that in the developed world, leading to a decline in aggregate poverty rate and in the number of people living on less than $1 a day.

Growth in the East Asia is particularly strong in. Even with economic crisis towards the end of the decade, growth average is 6.2 percent a year which resulted in a 44 percent reduction in the number of poor people in the region between 1990 and 2007.

More recently, the transition economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia have marked recovery-reversing the rising poverty of the past years.

The importance of growth for reducing poverty cannot be overstated. Poor people typically benefit from rising aggregate incomes and suffer from economic contractions.

Major improvements on the economy  has now increased by 20 years in 44 years, while the proportion of illiterate adults has been cut in half in the last 32 years.

The challenges in Africa are greatest in sub-Saharan Africa beset by high population growth rates, declining per capita incomes, and limited progress in reducing poverty.

While most regions have been affected by conflicts, to some countries like Sudan, Somalia and Democratic Republic of Congo, growing climate instability, and the mounting HIV/Aids epidemic, the economic and social costs of these developments have been harshest in Africa.            

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