As the campaign to promote a saving culture among the Rwandan population intensifies, the Capital Markets Advisory Council (CMAC) has welcomed the initiative as timely and important.

CMAC the body charged with the regulation of the capital markets in Rwanda as well as ensuring long term savings says the campaign will boost the overall national savings.

"With the publication of the law governing the collective investment scheme, we expect a robust creation of savings by population,” said Robert Mathu Executive Director of CMAC recently.

The regulatory body will play a role in this campaign by mobilizing long term savings and ensuring access to credit hence investment growth and income leading saving.

As Rwanda joins the East African Community (EAC), the campaign will help bring the county at par with the rest of the member states whose saving levels are relatively higher.

However, Mathu noted some challenges in the saving mobilization as lack of awareness as well as the many unpublished laws although a lot work has been done to pass them.

The three year savings mobilization campaign that was launched this week, seeks to raise the level of financial education skills that has been observed among all segments of Rwandan population which has slowed down savings and private investment.

In the government’s economic development and poverty eradication strategy, a goal was set to achieve a gross national savings of 18 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to attain a Gross National Investment (GNI) of 30 per cent of GDP.

The recent survey shows that majority of Rwandans don’t access formal banking services with 1 out of 5 Rwandans has access to formal banking services, 21 per cent of the adult population access formal banking services while 52 percent are totally excluded.

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