Africa: Rwanda’s capital embraces urban farming as development squeezes rare land

Irakoze described his work as “a different way of thinking about farming, from traditional large-scale upcountry farming to something smaller, modular, and that anyone can really do.”
AP News
9 April 2026
Excerpt:
Eighty-four-year-old Mukarusini Purisikira had been a farmer before she fled the country to Congo during the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis.
Upon returning, she said, her family’s land, which had stretched across the hills, had been taken away for construction. She gestured toward Kigali’s high-rise buildings.
Now she grows maize and sweet potatoes on a piece of land the size of a small cottage, which she said is barely enough to feed her.
“It is all I have,” she said, looking warily at construction equipment on a ridge nearby.
Now she has a measure of protection. Since September, Rwanda’s government has been mapping agricultural land and using satellite imagery to track any development encroaching on farmlands and forests in a country where the population is expected to reach 22 million in a couple of years.
Rwanda is striving to ensure food security amid the latest global pressures on farm inputs like fertilizer, whose prices have been rising since the Iran war began.
The government has imposed fines of up to $3,000 and jail terms of up to six months on developers found to be encroaching.
Some buildings in Kigali have been torn down, though people associated with them didn’t want to comment for fear of government retaliation. The government now plans to incorporate drones for better real-time monitoring.
Read the complete article here.
Source: https://cityfarmer.info/africa-rwandas-capital-embraces-urban-farming-as-development-squeezes-rare-land/
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