Belgium pledges €75 million for development

The Belgian government has pledged €75 million (US $90 million) as bilateral support for Rwanda’s health and education sectors as well as rural development, Belgian Cooperation Minister Marc Verwilghen said on Tuesday. He told reporters after a meeting with Rwandan President Paul Kagame in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, that the money would be disbursed over a three-year phase. "Since all the formalities have been finalised, we are immediately going to release €14 million [$16.8 million] for Rwanda to use in any of the mentioned sectors," he said. The Rwandan minister for cooperation, Protais Mitali, told IRIN that the Belgian government had endorsed a new bilateral convention in which it would only fund projects that had been recommended by the Rwandan government. "We have renewed our cooperation and have put in place new modalities on how to channel aid to strategic sectors as laid out in government programmes," Mitali said. He said that under an agreement signed in 1962, Belgium reserved the right to fund any project in the country, even if it were not among the government's priority projects. In the health sector, Rwanda will use the donation to improve infrastructure while in the education sector, the newly introduced universal primary education is due to benefit. Small-scale income generating activities are targeted under the support for rural development, in a bid to reduce the high poverty levels across the country. At least 60 percent of Rwanda's eight million people live on less than US $1 per day.