An Assessment of the Contribution of Mineral Exports to Rwanda’s Total Exports

Abstract

In 2012, the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM)2 proved that mineral exports can be an alternative for increasing exports for agrarian, low and middle income countries and that in the past two decades their contribution to total exports had increased from 30 to 60 per cent. Based on this theory, we use an econometric model and work with data techniques to test whether Rwanda maintained this pace from 1998 to 2014. Our results show that Rwanda did not manage to reach that level since she only averaged 29.1 per cent. The findings show that if mineral exports increase at 10 per cent, the total exports will increase at 7 per cent. This implies that the Government of Rwanda needs to bring in a lot of reforms in the mining sector and take Botswana and Namibia as its role models