Happiness in a Post-conflict Society: Rwanda

Abstract

The Republic of Rwanda is a small landlocked country located in the Great Lakes Region of East Central Africa, bordering Burundi, Congo, Tanzania and Uganda. It is a post-conflict society best known for the Genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, when, in the space of 100 days, extremist Hutu killed an estimated 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu, which left the country devastated. It is also known as the first country in the world to have more than 50% of its members of Parliament women. In this chapter we are going to look at Rwandan people's self-evaluation of their living conditions by asking how happy and satisfied they are with their lives. How do people feel about their lives in one of the poorest countries in the world, and one which, just 16 years ago, was torn apart by violent conflict that left the country in ruins and shattered many lives. The Genocide had catastrophic consequences on human as well as economic fronts. Sixteen years later, the Government which is dominated by the Patriotic Front, the Tutsi-dominated party led by President Paul Kagame, continues to strive for economic reconstruction and development to address the biggest challenges facing the country: demographic pressure, decreasing agricultural productivity, the landlocked nature of the country, the exorbitant cost of production factors, a narrow economic base and an inadequate infrastructure (roads, schools, health centres, water and sanitation, electrification). The Government began the difficult task of rebuilding the country following the Genocide with a strong commitment to achieving the Millennium Development Goals including halving poverty by 2015 and achieving middle development status by 2020. Subjective wellbeing as measured by happiness and general satisfaction with life, is influenced by many more factors than economic circumstances, although both objective economic circumstances and satisfaction with them are important. We show that Rwanda has a comparatively low score on the UNDP Human Development Index as well as on measures of subjective satisfaction and happiness. Over the last 10 years, we have developed a sociologically informed theoretical basis for the selection of indicators based on a societal quality model. It also enables us to select just a few indicators from rich data sets, making the interpretation of regression models easier. Here we use this theoretical model to select indicators to consider the main influences on subjective wellbeing. We consider both happiness and general satisfaction given the lack of previous research on subjective wellbeing in Rwanda. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)