Rwanda Today: When Foreign Aid Hurts More Than It Helps

By Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation in collaboration with
Emmanuel Hakizimana, Ph.D., Université du Québec à Montréal
And Brian Endless, Ph.D., Loyola University Chicago
April 5, 2009 – Chicago, Illinois

It has been fifteen years since the genocide that devastated Rwanda in 1994, and while the players and sides have changed, the politics sadly remain largely the same. Rwanda is enmeshed in another cycle of repression, with an elite that represents a clear minority
engaged in legal and extra-legal policies that impoverish the majority of the people in the country. In addition, this repression and violence flow across borders in the region, particularly into the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as evidenced recently.

Unfortunately for all involved, while foreign aid is crucial for the development of Rwanda and to lift it out of poverty, this same foreign aid is actually perpetuating the crisis. The government rules by and for the elite Tutsis who came out of Uganda in 1994 and their small group of allies. However, aid that flows to that government has the perverse effect of enabling this group to keep control – even when that control actually stems from purposefully limiting the development of the vast majority of the people in the country.
http://www.hrrfound ation.org/ files/file/ RwandaTodayForei gnAid.pdf