Rwanda is located in East-Central Africa, and is known as the “Land of a Thousand Hills.” It is classified as a low-income country and has extremely low Key Health Indicator statistics. Ranking 50th in worldwide infant mortality rate, having an excess of communicable diseases, and overall poor nutrition, Rwanda has a very long way to go before it can be classified higher on many different scales such as demographic transition, epidemiologic transition, and nutrition statistics.
The political and ethnic histories of Rwanda go hand in hand. Rwanda is unfortunately still extremely well known for its genocide that plagued the country in 1994, less than twenty years ago. Over 1,000,00 Tutsis and some Hutus were murdered and over two million people fled the country. This genocide ruined the economy, dismantled the government, and drove up incidence rate of communicable diseases.
The stage of demographic transition that best describes Rwanda’s current state is the first stage, which entails high fertility and high mortality and can be seen in Figure 1. There are demographic and economic factors that have kept Rwanda in such a volatile state. As seen in
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Yet, the pace of Rwanda’s epidemiologic transition is moving forward quickly towards the third stage of increased life expectancy, mortality decline, and less prominence of communicable diseases.5 According to a report in 2013 by The Atlantic, “Over the last decade in Rwanda, deaths from HIV, TB, and malaria dropped by 80 percent, maternal mortality dropped by 60 percent, life expectancy doubled -- all at an average health care cost of $55 per person per