Rural Poverty and Livelihood Profiles in Post-genocide Rwanda

The paper aims to identify the different livelihood profiles that prevail in post-conflict rural Rwanda. By means of exploratory tools such as principal component and cluster analysis, it combines variables that capture natural, physical, human, financial and social resources in combination with environmental factors to identify household groups with different asset portfolios and varying livelihoods. The paper also explores how household groups differ with regards to the intra-cluster incidence of poverty. Finally, for a subsample, it looks in detail at how the identified household clusters perceive changes in their living conditions between 2001 and 2004. The paper concludes that “fighting poverty” can take very different forms for groups with different livelihood profiles.