East African Business Week

KIGALI, RWANDA-  Rwanda has revised this year's growth projection to 8.8% driven by better performance in agriculture, services and industry sectors accompanied by more than expected credit growth.
The East African country, which has maintained low but rising inflation in the region, had initially projected growth to reach 7%, which was lower than 7.5% achieved last year.
However with credit growing unexpectedly by 20.9% as of August against annual target of 19.2% and agriculture by 8.2% plus, industry sector by 15.1% plus and services sector by 8.5% plus, Rwanda says the outlook looks better than it was expected.
The National Bank of Rwanda said in an economic review paper that better agricultural performance was a result of performance of harvests for 2011 seasons A and B at 10.4% than the harvest recorded in the same seasons at 9.5% in 2010.
 This was due to favourable weather conditions, government Crop Intensification Programme that focuses on increased supply and use of fertilizers and selected seeds and land consolidation programme.
 The non-agriculture activities also performed well as evidenced by the Bank's Composite Indicator of Economic Activities (CIEA), which increased in nominal terms by 11.8% in August compared to 10.8%, recorded in the same period of 2010. On average, the CIEA rose by 9.2% in the first eight months of 2011 compared to an increase of 6.8% in the first eight months of 2010.
 Performance in non agricultural activity is also evidenced by significant increase in the turnover registered by the industry and service sectors.