The Effects Of Agricultural Export On Poverty Alleviation In Rwanda

As different countries continue to lay foundations for achieving the Millennium Development Goals among them being uplifting the living standards of the masses proposed by the United Nations Charter of 2000,poverty eradication has remained the major unresolved challenge currently facing most of the developing countries especially in Africa.Various studies have documented some factors that assist in elevation of poverty including agricultural practices,effects of adverse climatice conditions and policies by the governments that would create an enabling environment that would allow creation of wealth by the citizens.In line with previous studies which propagate the notion that agricultural production provides the best means to achieve poverty eradication,this study aims to investigate the effect of agricultural export on poverty alleviation in Rwanda.Previous Studies on trade and exports have mainly focused on the economic value in which case,questions about the balance of trade and economic growth are the main objectives of such studies.Few studies have examined the overall social impact in terms of whether there are any significant effects derived from such cross-national engagements and the effects from overall agriculture are trickling down the value chain hence this study attempts to achieve this by investigating the effect of agricultural exports on poverty mitigation.We employed quantitative research method in which we used simple regression to analyze the data.From the 230 distributed questionnaires,200 were found to have been correctly filled hence representing a response rate of 87%.The respondents were mainly farmers currently engaged in tea,coffee and flower production in Rwanda.The mode of data collection adopted was done via online means in which a survey link containing the questionnaire was send via smart phones and email.Time series data was used in the analysis and the time span was from 2014 to 2017.The findings from this study suggest that agricultural export has a significant effect on the poverty alleviation such that,it positively contributes to the uplifting of standard of living of those farmers engaged producing mentioned cash crops.Furthermore,the results indicate a significant positive relationship between agricultural export and poverty alleviation.Therefore government in developing countries should strive to initiate policies that would create an enabling environment to facilitate engagements such as foreign direct investments especially in the agricultural sector as it has been established in this study agriculture plays a major role.This study is going to help the Government and investors to put their effort and investment in agriculture as main factor of poverty alleviation..