Has Rwanda been fiddling its numbers?

AT THE HEART of Rwanda’s capital sits the Kigali Convention Centre, a $300m monument that lights up the night with the national colours of blue, yellow and green. It symbolises modernity and prosperity in a country that has bounced back from a genocide in 1994 when perhaps 500,000 people, mostly Tutsis, were killed.

As impressive as the skyline are Rwanda’s economic statistics. In the past decade the economy has expanded by 8% a year. The share of people classified as poor has fallen by seven percentage points since 2011, to 38% in 2017.

Numbers such as these impress investors, donors and other African leaders. Many see Paul Kagame, the former general who ended the genocide and has called the shots in Rwanda ever since, as providing a model of development: that of an authoritarian who gets things done and helps the poor, even if he also tramples human rights. But what if the numbers are wrong?

Questions have hung over Rwanda’s statistics since the government claimed in 2014 that poverty had declined to 39% from 45% in 2011. A closer examination of the data by Filip Reyntjens of the University of Antwerp found that the fall was largely due to a change in how it calculates the numbers. In 2011 Rwanda’s poverty line reflected the cost of consuming a basket of the foods that poor Rwandans were buying. For its 2014...

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