Nearly one million rural households living outside designated settlement areas are expected to move gradually into planned settlements as the government implements the 2020–2050 National Land Use Master Plan.
Authorities said the transition would be phased, with households living in high-risk and disaster-prone areas receiving priority rather than being subjected to immediate mass relocation.
Alexis Rutagengwa, Head of the Land Use Management and Mapping Department at the National Land Authority, said about 65 percent of rural households currently live in planned settlements, while the remainder are in dispersed or spontaneous settlement patterns.
Rwanda has slightly more than 3.3 million households, including about 2.3 million in rural areas.
Based on the current settlement pattern, around 1.5 million rural households are already living in planned areas, while hundreds of thousands remain outside designated settlement zones.
“The government’s approach is to gradually transform settlement patterns while avoiding unnecessary displacement,” Rutagengwa said.
Under the 2020-2050 National Land Use Master Plan, 15.2 percent of Rwanda’s land is allocated for human settlement.
The plan reduced the number of scattered settlement sites from about 14,000 to approximately 3,000, with authorities seeking to make infrastructure and public services easier and less costly to provide.
Rutagengwa said the approximately 3,000 settlement sites should not be understood as entirely new areas that still need to be developed from scratch.
“The approximately 3,000 rural settlement sites identified under the 2020-2050 National Land Use Master Plan represent a long-term planned settlement structure rather than 3,000 sites that need to be developed from scratch,” he said.
Many households are already living within designated settlement areas, although the level of infrastructure differs from one area to another.
Some neighbourhoods have roads and other basic services, while others still require further investment through government and local development programmes.
Households currently living outside designated settlement areas will not automatically be required to relocate immediately.
“The most urgent priority is households living in high-risk zones and hazard-prone areas, where relocation may be necessary to protect lives and property,” Rutagengwa said.
He added that relocation in such cases would be carried out in line with existing policies and laws.
The challenge is particularly visible in Western Province, where more than 214,000 households, representing about 29 percent of households in the province, live outside areas designated for residential settlement.
Western Province Governor Jean Bosco Ntibitura said the province has about 671,000 households, of which approximately 457,000 live in designated settlement areas.
“The others who live in areas that are not designated as settlements will gradually move towards those areas because all infrastructure is provided in designated settlements,” Ntibitura said.
He said households outside designated areas would not be moved immediately because some planned settlement sites had yet to be fully developed.
The Rwanda Housing Authority has set a target of relocating more than 41,000 households into planned and resilient settlements by 2029.
The target includes 32,000 households living in scattered rural settlements, 3,436 households in informal urban settlements and 6,089 households living in high-risk areas.
Between 2017 and 2024, Rwanda relocated 144,628 households into planned settlements nationwide.
The wider plan is intended to concentrate housing in areas where roads, water, electricity and other services can be provided more efficiently, while allowing households outside designated settlements to move progressively as planned areas are developed.
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