Health and Nutrition Sector

Healthcare in Rwanda has historically been of inadequate quality but in recent decades has seen a great improvement by operating a Universal Health Coverage and is now considered to have one of the highest-quality health systems in Africa. Rwanda is internationally recognized for its success in offering universal access to healthcare with over 84% of Rwandans insured by the Community Based Health Insurance (CBHI). The government has ensured that its citizens have access to primary health care.

Due to the “Division of Labor” of the Government of Rwanda, Health Sector was not among the JICA Rwanda Office’s interventions pillars before, but after the hit of Covid-19, JICA realized its need. Through rapid spread of COVID-19 that threatened the health and livelihoods of people across the world, JICA launched the “JICA’s Initiative for Global Health and Medicine” in July 2020, to strengthen its work in protecting people’ lives. Through that initiative, JICA Rwanda Office started mutual discussion with the Government of Rwanda to intervene in Health Sector and, JICA started focusing on providing its support to the improvement of Health sector activities in different areas since 2021.

• Type of Cooperation: Technical Cooperation Project
• Objective: To strengthen the Community Health Program at National level for nationwide deployment and integration of Polyvalent Community Health Workers (CHWs) and Community Health Nurses (CHNs)
• Target beneficiaries: Health Centers, Health Posts and Health Community Nurses
• Counter Parts: MoH/RBC

From July 2021 to February 2022, JICA conducted “Data Collection Survey on Medical facilities and Equipment in Response to COVID-19 for African Countries” for 22 African nations including Rwanda to examine the possibility of formulating a Japanese Grant Aid project that includes the provision of medical facilities and equipment.

Since March 2022, Ministry of Health/RBC and JICA started the collaboration to establish the support activities in Primary Health Care system in Rwanda. Ministry of Health submitted the official application form for Technical Cooperation (TC) Project and that was approved by the Government of Japan in March 2023
The overall goal of this TC is to improve the Community Health Program based on Primary Health Care(PHC) approach.

Main activities of this project are to review and update policy frameworks, implementation guidelines and related documents for the reformed CHP, develop and provide a sample of set essential equipment for CHNs training to support the development of equipment maintenance and replacement plans .

Childhood stunting remains one of the major public health challenges of the 21st century. In the Republic of Rwanda, the estimated prevalence of stunting among children under five years of age in 2019/20 was 33.1%, with a concentration of 41% in the Western Province. The Rwandan government has set “reducing stunting and malnutrition” as one of the five priority areas of the Second National Strategic Transformation (NST2) and aims to reduce the proportion of stunted under-five children to 15% by 2029.

The 2020 Demographic Health Survey (DHS) indicates that the prevalence of stunting remains at 33%, and the rate of stunting reduction has been slowing down in recent years (average reduction rate: 1.0% per year in the last 5 years). JICA has been supporting the field of nutrition in Rwanda through the “Development Policy Loan on Nutrition Improvement through Agriculture Transformation” (2019-2021), and the dispatch of Nutrition Policy Advisor to NCDA since 2021.

Type of Cooperation: Technical Cooperation Individual Expert
Duration: 2024-2026
Target Beneficiaries: MIGEPROF/NCDA

In 2021, JICA and NCDA started a cooperation program to dispatch a Nutrition Policy Advisor to be embedded in NCDA. The overall goal was to strengthen the institutional capacity. That is to deliver high-quality nutrition and child development interventions in a well-coordinated manner and to improve nutrition status of children and women at district and national levels.

The Nutrition Policy Advisor to NCDA provide the technical support in multi-sectoral coordination of nutrition plans, capacity building of decentralized personnel portfolio as well as collaborating with Agriculture and WASH sectors to mainstream nutrition in the JICA-supported projects.

As stunting reduction through nutrition improvement continues to be a high priority in Rwanda, NCDA continues to play a leading role as well as an important coordination role at the high-level of the Government towards nutritional improvement of Rwandans. In this context, JICA is also committed to continue supporting the Government of Rwanda through this initiative of eradicating malnutrition and stunting reduction.