The budget will focus on building an infrastructure backbone

Rwangombwa heads to parliament to read last Year’s Budget

In the 2012/2013 fiscal year, the Government of Rwanda will emphasize scaling up of infrastructure projects to enhance growth and poverty reduction strategies.

This was stressed during Thursday’s reading of the National Budget that took place at the parliamentary building by the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning John Rwangombwa.

According to the budget, this year infrastructure will receive 23 percent of the entire budget compared to the share of 21 percent in the previous fiscal year 2011/12.

“Infrastructure is the backbone of the economy. To encourage the investment that will create more employment for our people, therefore we need to remove the physical infrastructure bottlenecks that exist,” said Rwangombwa.

“We need to have our entire population connected to steady supply of electricity, good roads and access to clean water and high speed internet among others. This will accelerate the progress that has seen one million Rwandans pull themselves out of poverty in the last five years.”

This development will see the construction and rehabilitation of over 460 kilometers of roads, adding 30MW to the national grid, and scaling up investment projects in local governments to Rwf79 billion compared with Rwf 25 billion in the previous year.

The budget reflects a significant decrease in the Government of Rwanda’s dependence on donor aid from development partners. The 2012/13 budget’s share funded by aid is 46 percent compared with 85 percent in 2000. “The Government remains determined to progressively reduce its level of dependency,” says the statement

Noting this the Minister said, “While we appreciate all the indispensable help we received from each of our development partners over the last 18 years, we have always focused on using each development project to address current concerns and create a concrete change so that future generations would not be dependent on aid.”

Government spending in the next fiscal year, which begins in July, is also set to rise by Rwf184.4 billion to over Rwf1.3 trillion as treasury scales up spending on infrastructure to boost private sector growth, a policy priority in the country’s vision 2020.