Rwanda after Live Aid

In Rwanda, Africa's most densely populated country, life expectancy is less than 46 years. The country has been beset by ethnic tension between the dominant Tutsi minority and the majority Hutus, which led to the breakout of the civil war in 1990. A few years later, Rwanda experienced Africa's worst genocide in modern times; over 800,000 Tutsi people were killed and millions fled the country.  Despite its recent impressive economic growth and development, Rwanda remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Agriculture has been key to Rwanda’s development, however this makes it vulnerable to the constraints of bad weather and the lack of modern technology.

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Time Line

• 1973 The first president of Rwanda since independence (Gregoire Kayibanda from 1962 to 1973) was ousted in a coup d'etat by Juvenal Habyarimana who introduced one party rule and remained in power for two decades until the Rwandan genocide. At first rising commodity prices brought some prosperity but there was rapid decline into poverty.

• 1977 The situation of widespread poverty in Rwanda had destroyed any community capacity for orphans. Seeing children in such need drove SOS Children to enter Rwanda and set up family based care for orphans in an SOS Children's Village as well as a medical centre and a primary and secondary school.

• 1988 Some 50,000 Hutu refugees flee to Rwanda from Burundi following ethnic violence there.

• 1990 An armed group of Tutsi refugees invades Northern Rwanda from Uganda starting the Rwanda Civil War.

• 1993 A cease fire in the Rwandan Civil war gave temporary relief to long suffering Rwandans

• 1994 The Rwandan genocide; in six months following the murder of President Habyarimana some 800,000 people are massacred. SOS Children immediately set up an Emergency Village for children orphaned by the genocide. The Gisimba orphanage, just outside the capital, Kigali helped save more than 400 people’s lives during the tragedy.

Children at the SOS Primary School Kigali Rwanda

• 2001 A new flag and national anthem are unveiled to try to promote national unity and reconciliation.

• 2006 Rwanda's 12 provinces are replaced by a smaller number of regions with the aim of creating ethnically-diverse administrative areas. The United States Government introduce a programme called the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), to tackle the high numbers of Rwandans at risk from the disease, focusing particularly on the most vulnerable groups – children under five and pregnant women.

• 2009 170,000 Rwandans are living with HIV/AIDS.
  

• 2012 Rwanda is on course for a real GDP growth of 7.7% thanks to services and industry.
  

• 2013 Growth is slowing down due in large part to foreign aid suspension over evidence that the Rwandan state supports the Democratic Republic of Congo's M23 rebels. Tight fiscal policies are also having a negative effect.