Who are and where are the Rwanda’s poorest? A Small Area Estimation Method

Abstract

As Rwanda is achieving its vision of moving from a low to a middle–income country during the period 2000–2020, its capability of ending poverty along the Sustainable Development Goals’ era (2015–2030) mostly depends on how well the increasing prosperity will be shared among Rwandans along the way up to the 2030 horizon. Knowing those who have not yet benefited enough from the ongoing progress should help Rwanda’s policy makers and other development agencies to serve that purpose. With this perspective, this work has the two major objectives of estimating poverty by sector and studying the relationship between poverty and related variables in Rwanda. We tackle the first objective with the Small Area Estimation method (SAE) and covers the second with the Poisson regression. We find that (1) most of the very poor are located within rural areas, (2) live in larger households and, (3) have female household heads.