From Uzziel Ndagijimana, Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Rwanda

The IMF Article IV Consultation dated July 3 2019 concludes that “Rwanda has made considerable progress in sustaining high and inclusive growth and reducing poverty’. This is consistent with what we know, as well as the findings of all international organisations.

The same IMF report states that “the quality of the national accounts data in Rwanda is one of the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa”. Indeed, the only reason this debate can take place, whether in good faith or bad, is because of Rwanda’s robust and publicly accessible data systems.

I was therefore profoundly surprised by your Big Read article “Even poverty data must toe Kagame’s line” (August 14).

The National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda responded fully to the Financial Times’s questions, but the author ignored those responses, as well as data from global institutions, including the World Bank, IMF, S&P, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum. More seriously, the alacrity with which your reporters dragged the president’s name into a debate ostensibly about statistical methodology is astonishing, to say the least.

Your readers have not been exposed to an honest debate on poverty data, but rather to a series of anonymous and baseless claims.

Beyond statistics, Rwanda’s progress is plain for anyone to see. Rwanda is open to scrutiny and conversation with all who are interested in our journey of socio-economic transformation.

Here is the link to Minister's response https://www.ft.com/content/c66d2982-c006-11e9-89e2-41e555e96722?segmentid=acee4131-99c2-09d3-a635-873e61754ec6