Post-Conflict Economic Recovery: Lessons from the Great Lakes

Economic recovery in post-conflict settings is not merely a technical challenge of restoring growth — it is a deeply political process of negotiating who benefits from reconstruction, who bears its costs, and which visions of the economy prevail. The Great Lakes region, which has experienced recurrent cycles of violence and recovery across Rwanda, Burundi, eastern DRC, and Uganda since the 1990s, offers an unparalleled laboratory for studying these dynamics.

This working paper presents findings from a comparative study of economic recovery trajectories across these four contexts, covering the period from 1995 to 2024. The analysis traces the relationship between the design of post-conflict economic programmes and their outcomes for social cohesion, inequality, and the durability of peace. The evidence suggests that programmes prioritising rapid GDP recovery and macroeconomic stabilisation — without attention to distributional concerns — have frequently produced inclusive growth on paper but exclusionary outcomes in practice.

Rwanda's experience is particularly instructive. Following the genocide, international support enabled rapid economic reconstruction, but the benefits accrued disproportionately to urban areas and to those with proximity to political power. Rural communities, where the majority of the population and most of the violence was concentrated, saw slower gains. This distributional imbalance has been identified by multiple scholars as a latent driver of ongoing grievance.

The paper proposes a framework for post-conflict economic programming that foregrounds distributional equity alongside macroeconomic recovery. Key recommendations include: the mandatory inclusion of conflict sensitivity in economic strategy documents; the use of disaggregated data to track how recovery benefits are distributed across social groups; and the integration of transitional justice mechanisms with economic policy to ensure that those most affected by conflict are not systematically excluded from its recovery.