UNDP in Rwanda

Small economies are often told they're simply too small to attract serious development finance. Day 2's Development Partners Roundtable pushed back on that.

Chairing the session, Rwanda's Minister of Finance, Hon. Yusuf Murangwa, put the counter-argument plainly: the answer to being small isn't to lower your ambitions, it's to pool them. Countries that consolidate their demand, standards and markets turn scale from a limitation into leverage.

The same logic showed up in what actually works. Rwanda's school feeding programme began as a donor-funded activity; today it is government-owned and run as national policy. The cooperation didn't end when the external funding did; it became the country's own. That, more than any single project, is the model the convention keeps pointing to: solutions built to be handed over, not held.

The partners in the room, including African Development Bank co-chair Aissa Toure Sarr, EU Ambassador H.E. Belén Calvo Uyarra, and Andrea Bagnoli, Country Director, World Food Programme, kept returning to the same conditions for getting there: trust, transparency and accountability, and a stubborn focus on outcomes over activity. Not how much is done, but what actually changes and stays changed.

Aligning finance with development goals doesn't happen on its own. It takes consolidation, trust, and the patience to build partnerships that outlast the funding that started them.