The aim of this thesis is to probe further into the manifestations and dynamics of food insecurity in Rwanda by attending to women’s voices and experiences. By interviewing women from Nyabihu, a rural district in the Western province of Rwanda, this thesis addresses questions of how women in rural Rwanda understand and experience food insecurity as well as the strategies they use in order to prevent and cope with it. The study also explores women’s views of how ongoing agricultural reforms affect household food security in the Rwandan context. Theoretically, this thesis departs from literature on food security, the global debate about whether food security is a technical or political problem, as well as the study of development and gender. The analytical framework of the study addresses availability of food, access to food and the stability of the two, as well as the gender dimensions of household food security among women in Rwanda. Methodologically this study is a qualitative case study. The data were collected using semi-structured interviews with 51 female respondents and seven informants. This study’s findings support the view that food security is not only a technical problem that can be solved through increased food production, but that it is also crucial to understand how access to food is experienced by various groups of people. Moreover, the results indicate that there is an obvious gap between government food security policy and women’s experiences. The stories from the respondents reveal that food insecurity is partly related to the implementation of agricultural reforms in Nyabihu district. The study also shows that food security in Rwanda needs to be understood in relation to issues of land and poverty since these play an important part in determining women’s food in/security. In addition, women’s experiences differ depending on their financial situation and their access to land. This study also found that intra-household dynamics such as distribution of household resources, gendered power relations between men and women, as well as participation in households’ income decisions play a part in food in/security in Rwandan households. Theoretically, this study contributes to existing food security theories by deepening the understanding of food insecurity from a gendered perspective and fine-tuning the analytic framework. The empirical contribution this study makes consists of the focus on women and food insecurity in Rwandan rural households, raising issues with regard to household dynamics partly ignored in previous studies.

While Rwanda first attracted the world’s attention for the genocide that took place in 1994, 16 years later the country is capturing interest because it now has the highest number of women in its parliament than in any other country in the world. After the first post-genocide legislative elections, in 2003, about 49% of elected legislators in the lower house of Parliament were women. Five years later, women constitute over 56% of elected legislators following the subsequent elections in September 2008. This success of women at the ballot box is unprecedented in the history of representative and electoral politics anywhere. Women politicians’ success in elections is so far attributed to the 30% reserved seats for women. However, the electoral outcome for women far exceeds this constitutional quota. This thesis, through methodological triangulation explores the factors and conditions that can help us develop a better contextual understanding of how and why women managed to perform relatively better at elections. Following an explorative and descriptive approach, I seek to understand and explain electoral outcome for women through the subjective understandings and interpretations of women politicians who experience, affect and are affected by the electoral process. I also learn from political party leaders as gatekeepers of who gets to represent parties in elections and why they select the candidates that they do. This approach is supplemented by reading documentary evidence such as electoral laws, published works and dominant elite discourse as they are discerned from political speeches addressing how presence in sites of power is constructed and justified. Overall, findings show that women’s success at the ballot box is neither accidental nor a consequence of one single factor such as quotas. Instead, the high numbers of women in Rwanda’s Parliament can be understood to be a consequence of varied factors and conditions embedded in the country’s violent political past and the recent socio-political changes driven by the elite. In this thesis, I suggest that this change, where the dominant political elite are trying to shape the political environment away from the Tutsi-Hutu politicised and dichotomised differences towards commonness under the politics of gender equality and homogenising political categories through the rubric of Rwandan-ness can also be better understood when one comprehends the effects of the war and genocide. This also calls for comprehending the historical, political and institutional contexts within which electoral politics takes place as well as how political power is organized and legitimised rather than focusing on one single element such as reserved seats. In this regard, the role of dominant elite discourse in constructing and justifying presence in sites of power is highlighted.

You talk to them and you think they listen, but the people do nothing with the good advice you give them. They say “yes” because they are tired of you and your speeches, but they are never convinced... They are resistant; they are really difficult (district official in Rwanda’s southern province quoted by Ansoms, 2009: 10). Since overt resistance to government policy in post-genocide Rwanda is risky, discontent is more commonly expressed through everyday resistance... (Newbury, 2011: 236)

Child malnutrition remains a critical concern in Uganda. Almost 3 in 10 children between 6 to 59 months are stunted, four percent are wasted, and 11 percent are underweight (UBOS & ICF International, 2018). While most districts in the country experience high child malnutrition, there is a divide between urban and rural areas and between northern and southern districts. Children in rural areas and the northern part of Uganda experience more malnutrition when compared to children who reside in urban areas or the southern part of the country (World Food Programme, 2019). At a regional level, Tooro region has the highest percentage (40.6%) of stunted children, closely followed by Bugisu region (36%) and Karamoja region (35.2%) as of 2016. Concerning wasting children, the West-Nile region has the highest percentage, with 10.4%, closely followed by the Karamoja region, with 10%. Finally, Karamoja region has the highest percentage of underweight children (25.8%), closely followed by West-Nile ‘(16.7%) and Acholi with 15.4%.