In the hills above Rwanda’s capital, a woman named Dative Mfitumukiza sells cassava flour she mills herself, earns the equivalent of roughly USD 80 a day, and is putting her children through school. A decade ago, she had almost nothing. Growing up with a physical disability in Musanze district, she says, made life feel impossible. Today she calls herself a businesswoman — and, in ways that extend far beyond her own story, she represents the quiet revolution underway across this landlocked East African nation.
Rwanda’s economy expanded by 8.9% in 2024, according to the World Bank, a pace that puts it well ahead of the global average and most of its regional peers. The services sector, agriculture, and industry all posted strong gains. Over half a million new jobs were created on a year-on-year basis. Those figures would be impressive for any country. For a nation that, in 1994, lost roughly a million people in just 100 days of genocide, they are nothing short of extraordinary.
But behind the aggregate numbers lies a story the world’s financial press tends to underreport: the disproportionate role women are playing in generating, sustaining, and anchoring that growth — and the persistent structural headwinds they navigate while doing so.
A parliament that changed everything — and its limits
Rwanda is, by now, internationally recognised for one achievement above all others: it became the first country in history to have a majority-female parliament. Women currently hold 63.8% of seats in the lower house, according to Rwanda’s Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion Directorate General of Gender Promotion and Women Empowerment — a figure sustained across successive elections since the country embedded a 30% gender quota in its 2003 constitution. By 2024, women also occupied 50% of cabinet positions.
The political consequences have been real. Legislation guaranteeing women’s land rights, criminalising marital rape, extending maternity leave, and establishing gender budget statements across government ministries all passed in the years following women’s entry into legislative leadership. The World Economic Forum WEF 2024 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Rwanda 39th in the world and second in Africa for overall gender parity — the only sub-Saharan African country where women share equal representation with men in parliament.
Yet political empowerment and economic parity are not the same thing. Rwanda’s own gender analysts acknowledge as much. The country’s Gender Monitoring Office and UN Women have documented a stubborn gap between women’s formal representation and their real economic clout at the household level. Female-headed households, which account for 43% of all households in Rwanda as of 2021, according to the National Institute of Statistics, are more likely to live in poverty and face higher unemployment rates than those headed by men. Legislation, it turns out, travels faster than culture.
“When all are involved as partners towards our common goal for equality, households and communities become more prosperous, unified, and peaceful.”
— Jennet Kem, UN Women Representative in Rwanda
Women dominate small business — but not the returns
Walk through any of Rwanda’s district markets and the evidence is immediate: women are selling, trading, transporting, and processing goods at every turn. The numbers reflect what the eye sees. Women own 51% of small and medium enterprises SMEs in Rwanda, a figure cited by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GIZ, which has committed 6.1 million euros to a women’s economic empowerment project running through mid-2026 in partnership with Rwanda’s Ministry of Trade and Industry.
But ownership and profit are two different categories. Despite controlling the majority of small businesses, women-owned enterprises consistently generate lower earnings than their male-owned counterparts. The reasons are familiar to development economists around the world, even if they often go unaddressed in the enthusiasm over headline statistics: limited access to collateral-backed loans, restricted networking and mentorship channels, traditional gender norms that confine women’s business activities to lower-margin sectors, and workplace harassment that suppresses career advancement.
Rwanda has attempted structural remedies. The government’s Business Development Fund maintains a Women’s Guarantee Fund that provides up to 75% credit guarantees and a 15% grant on total loans disbursed, allowing women entrepreneurs without collateral to access commercial financing. The Rwanda Standards Board also developed Africa’s first Gender Equality Standard — designated RS 560:2023 — requiring companies to embed gender equality benchmarks in their operations. These are not symbolic gestures. They are functioning mechanisms. But their reach, for now, extends to a fraction of the women who need them.
Agriculture: the invisible backbone
Perhaps nowhere is the gap between contribution and recognition more acute than in agriculture. Women account for 79% of the agricultural labour force in Rwanda, according to UN Women — an extraordinary share of the sector that employs 40% of the entire national workforce and contributes 27% to gross domestic product GDP, according to the World Bank 2025 Rwanda Economic Update.
In practice, this means women are producing the food that feeds Rwanda and generates a substantial share of its export revenues — while consistently receiving fewer agricultural inputs, less access to improved seeds and technology, and more restricted entry to higher-value markets than male farmers. UN Women researchers describe the resulting productivity gap as one of the country’s most consequential economic inefficiencies: closing it, they argue, would unlock “a huge opportunity for women’s empowerment, economic development, and societal resilience.”
Key figure: Rwandan women spend an average of seven hours per day on unpaid care work, compared to men’s average of 2.1 hours, according to UN Women. That disparity alone accounts for a significant portion of the gender gap in formal economic participation — time that could otherwise be invested in training, business development, or market engagement.
The care economy: the cost nobody counts
The seven-hour figure matters more than it might initially appear. Development economists have long argued that unpaid care work — cooking, childcare, fetching water, caring for the elderly — is effectively an unacknowledged tax levied almost exclusively on women. In Rwanda, where the poverty rate remains significant and household infrastructure is often limited, that burden is heavy and persistent.
UN Women has responded with targeted interventions. In partnership with the Nyaruguru district, it helped establish Early Childhood Development Centres that provide children with nutritional meals and educational activities at affordable cost — freeing women to pursue income-generating work during daytime hours. Over three years, more than 200 women have sent their children to these facilities while pursuing their own livelihoods. One programme, backed by USD 2 million in Swiss development funding and implemented through partnerships with the Association for the Development and Empowerment of People with Disabilities and the Elderly ADEPE Rwanda and the Young Women’s Christian Association, has reached more than 2,500 women with business management training, financial literacy coaching, and startup capital. About 80% of participants went on to start or expand businesses.
Dative Mfitumukiza, the woman with the cassava flour business in Musanze, was among them. Her story is not a feel-good anecdote. It is evidence of what targeted investment, when it reaches women on their own terms, actually produces.
Digital access and the path ahead
One dimension of Rwanda’s gender story that international observers underweight is the country’s unusually high mobile phone penetration among women. 84% of Rwandan women have access to mobile phones, compared to 88% of men — a gap far smaller than in most low- and middle-income countries and one that has materially expanded women’s access to mobile financial services, e-learning platforms, and digital markets.
That connectivity is not incidental. Rwanda’s government has embedded digital access into its Vision 2050 development strategy, recognising that the technology economy will be the decisive arena of long-term growth. Closing the remaining digital gender gap — including in science, technology, engineering and mathematics STEM education at the secondary and tertiary levels, where significant disparities persist — is explicitly targeted in national policy frameworks as a prerequisite for inclusive transformation.
The World Bank 2024 labour market analysis noted that employment growth in Rwanda has been “broad-based, with women benefiting slightly more than men” during the recent jobs boom. That is a meaningful data point. But it also reflects how much lost ground there is still to recover — and how much more growth would be possible if women’s economic participation matched their already-exceptional political representation.
Why the world should pay closer attention
The standard critique of Rwanda’s gender story from international commentators tends to oscillate between two poles: uncritical celebration of the parliament numbers, and sceptical dismissal of those numbers as government optics that mask persistent inequality. Both responses miss the more interesting truth, which is that Rwanda is living out a genuine and ongoing experiment — imperfect, contested, and instructive — in whether rapid institutional change can produce real shifts in women’s economic lives.
The evidence suggests it can, partially and unevenly, and that the limiting factor is almost never women’s capacity or ambition. It is the structural conditions — access to finance, freedom from unpaid care burdens, protection from harassment, entry to higher-value markets — that determine whether ambition translates into economic power. Rwanda has made more progress on those conditions than almost any country in sub-Saharan Africa. It has not made enough.
For international investors, development agencies, and policymakers looking at Africa’s economic future, Rwanda’s women represent both an argument and an opportunity. The argument: that gender equity is not a social goal that competes with economic growth, but one of its most reliable engines. The opportunity: that targeted investment in the conditions enabling women’s full economic participation — in Rwanda and across the continent — is among the highest-return bets available.
Women like Dative Mfitumukiza are not waiting for the world to figure that out. They are already building, already selling, already feeding families and paying school fees with money they earned themselves. What they need — and what development partners and governments owe them — is a policy environment and a financial architecture that finally matches the scale of what they are already doing.
Rwanda is closer to that than most. The rest of the world should be paying much closer attention to how it got there, and how far it still has to go.
