6 ms·

I think just you can get a glimpse by what they export (from Wikipedia): - Malawi: tobacco (55%), dried legumes (8.8%), sugar (6.7%), tea (5.7%), cotton (2%),

I think just you can get a glimpse by what they export (from Wikipedia): - Malawi: tobacco (55%), dried legumes (8.8%), sugar (6.7%), tea (5.7%), cotton (2%), peanuts, coffee, soy (2015 est.) - Rwanda: Gold, tin ores, coffee, malt extract, rare earth ores I can easily see why one has a higher GDP than the other. Very little mistery to me.

exe34 5mo ago
The agricultural exporters probably have a lot less heavy metal in their blood.
alephnerd 5mo ago
Also, foreign aid. Rwanda received massive amounts of foreign aid unlike Malawi [0] and de facto colonized the DRC's mine fields [1] [0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ODAT.GN.ZS?locations=RW-MW https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ODAT.GN.ZS?locat... [1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/rwanda-exercises-command-control-over-m23-rebels-say-un-experts-2025-07-02/ https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/rwanda-exercises-comman...
- londons_explore 5mo ago
  Foreign aid is rarely a gift - in almost all cases it is a business transaction. It is given as a loan, or in return for some mineral rights, or for an important UN vote, or for allegiance in a war. For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt.
  - sofixa 5mo ago
    No. A lot of foreign aid is direct things like food, medicine, doctors, AIDS prevention programmes, vaccines for specific things, maternal care, containment of an Ebola epidemic, etc. Do you really think that e.g. Kenya is voting alongside EU members because the EU paid for a part of a highway between two cities in Kenya? Then yes, there are loans and grants for infrastructure things. > For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt. That's not true. The rates are very public, and while sometimes they are on the higher end, unaffordable is a stretch, and that's how loan rates work. It is inherently risky to give loans to a developing country with high corruption rates. That's why there are also lots of direct grants or direct physical aid with stuff instead of money. The IMF also sometimes gives loans with strict requirements on market reforms, which can be controversial. Notably in the former Soviet/Warsaw pact bloc, economic shock therapy under instruction of the IMF had some devastating short term consequences, and in some countries led to mass dubious privtisations. In most though, it paid off and led to rapid and sustained economic and social growth.
    - alephnerd 5mo ago
      Sadly you got downvoted to oblivion but you are absolutely correct. I'm honestly disheartened by how much HN has degraded into Reddit now.
      - bigyabai 5mo ago
        C'mon now, you don't get to break the guidelines when the site disagrees with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
  - edbaskerville 5mo ago
    The Rwanda case cannot be told without Paul Kagame, one of the rare authoritarians who is also a real nation-builder, analogous to Park Chung Hee (South Korea, 1960s-1970s). He locks up his opponents but also has leveraged aid to really help socioeconomic conditions. E.g., the very close and productive collaboration with Partners in Health/Paul Farmer.
    - alephnerd 5mo ago
      Kagame cannot be compared to Park Chung Hee or LKY. Park's economic policies actually helped South Korea climb up the economic value chain, though a lot of that was also due to Japanese technology transfers to Korea in the 1960s-90s. On the other hand, Kagame's execution on economic reform has been a failure when compared against Uganda, as Uganda [0] has a significantly more complex (ie. higher value) economy than Rwanda [1] despite also suffering a severe civil war in the 1990s and dealing with the Idi Amin's kleptocratic rule in the 1980s. [0] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/800/export-basket https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/800/export-basket [1] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/646/export-basket https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/646/export-basket
      - edbaskerville 5mo ago
        Thanks, that's interesting. & that is a great website...
sofixa 5mo ago
There are a few things to note here. For both, around half of GDP is in the services sector. It doesn't matter that much what raw resources they export when it's a smaller portion of GDP (23% in Rwanda, 15% in Malawi). Also, almost all of those raw resources that Rwanda exports are stolen from the DRC by Rwanda-backed militias. Foreign aid, and Rwanda's ability to position itself geopolitically as a trusted stable partner (which enables more aid and for it to get away with theft and murder) have more impact than maize vs gold. And in the end, there are plenty of countries that have successfully developed and become less or not poor without having anything of serious value to export. From Bangladesh to the Balkans (I mean post-decolonisation Balkans, not post-Iron Curtain - it was mostly an area with subsistence farming as the main employment, disease, low rates of literacy and very low for higher education, frequent conflict and ethnic/religious tensions, few natural resources other than grain and some very limited amounts coal/minerals). If anything, it usually is the opposite, cf. the resource curse.
boelboel 5mo ago
There's barely any mines in Rwanda btw. DRC is closer to the later in terms of exports and I wouldn't say it's doing better.
- ExpertAdvisor01 5mo ago
  Rwanda controls significant amount of mines in eastern drc(north kivu) through the m23 rebels.
nearbuy 5mo ago
As the article states, that Malawi hasn't developed much industry or exports is more of a description of poverty than an explanation. Malawi can grow coffee, but mostly doesn't. They have rare earth element deposits, but little mining. Why haven't they developed more?
- elmomle 5mo ago
  Could it be that they haven't been so infected by the money bug that for now they still have a society oriented around happiness and maintaining traditional ways of life rather than economic attainment?
  - abigail95 5mo ago
    Would you want to live there?
    - cylemons 5mo ago
      As a non Malawian no, but I do think its important to ask what the local sentiment of their country is.
  - aaronbrethorst 5mo ago
    They're fourth from the bottom on the happiness index. https://mwnation.com/malawi-named-the-4th-least-happiest-country/ https://mwnation.com/malawi-named-the-4th-least-happiest-cou...
  - jonathanlydall 5mo ago
    I live in South Africa and my gardener happens to be Malawian, as was a gardener my parents had when I was growing up. They’re both good people with pride in their work, but they are from poverty and have little in the way of skills except for manual labour jobs. They came to South Africa, like so many from nearby countries, as our significantly more developed economy offers far better earning opportunity. Not relevant to your comment, but want to also mention this creates xenophobic tension with the section of the local population which is in poverty as they feel their jobs are stolen. While there are certainly cases where people illegally employ immigrants to pay them less than locals, in cases where pay is at least equal, Zimbabweans and Malawians tend to have reputation of being more honest and hard working than the indigenous population. We have Nigerians come here too and by contrast they tend to be super scetchy.
pseudohadamard 5mo ago
I haven't been to Malawi but I've spent time in Lesotho which is in a fairly similar position: A nation made up mostly of peasant farmers barely surviving on small, not-very-productive plots that are heavily dependent on there being rain at the right time, a bit like a lot of central/eastern Europe 150+ years ago. There just isn't anything there to build on, you can't get taxes from someone with no money, you can't combine family-held plots into larger productive farms with the former landowners working as farm laborers - you could have a hundred years ago as an evil colonizer but not today - there's really no way out. On the other hand while the people had nothing, they didn't seem terribly upset by it. Everyone just got on with their lives, there was (compared to the surrounding South Africa) very little to no crime or violence, it was a poor but not miserable country. Do you need to be well-off to be happy?

exe34 5mo ago

The agricultural exporters probably have a lot less heavy metal in their blood.

alephnerd 5mo ago

Also, foreign aid. Rwanda received massive amounts of foreign aid unlike Malawi [0] and de facto colonized the DRC's mine fields [1] [0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ODAT.GN.ZS?locations=RW-MW https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ODAT.GN.ZS?locat... [1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/rwanda-exercises-command-control-over-m23-rebels-say-un-experts-2025-07-02/ https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/rwanda-exercises-comman...

londons_explore 5mo ago
Foreign aid is rarely a gift - in almost all cases it is a business transaction. It is given as a loan, or in return for some mineral rights, or for an important UN vote, or for allegiance in a war. For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt.
- sofixa 5mo ago
  No. A lot of foreign aid is direct things like food, medicine, doctors, AIDS prevention programmes, vaccines for specific things, maternal care, containment of an Ebola epidemic, etc. Do you really think that e.g. Kenya is voting alongside EU members because the EU paid for a part of a highway between two cities in Kenya? Then yes, there are loans and grants for infrastructure things. > For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt. That's not true. The rates are very public, and while sometimes they are on the higher end, unaffordable is a stretch, and that's how loan rates work. It is inherently risky to give loans to a developing country with high corruption rates. That's why there are also lots of direct grants or direct physical aid with stuff instead of money. The IMF also sometimes gives loans with strict requirements on market reforms, which can be controversial. Notably in the former Soviet/Warsaw pact bloc, economic shock therapy under instruction of the IMF had some devastating short term consequences, and in some countries led to mass dubious privtisations. In most though, it paid off and led to rapid and sustained economic and social growth.
  - alephnerd 5mo ago
    Sadly you got downvoted to oblivion but you are absolutely correct. I'm honestly disheartened by how much HN has degraded into Reddit now.
    - bigyabai 5mo ago
      C'mon now, you don't get to break the guidelines when the site disagrees with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
- edbaskerville 5mo ago
  The Rwanda case cannot be told without Paul Kagame, one of the rare authoritarians who is also a real nation-builder, analogous to Park Chung Hee (South Korea, 1960s-1970s). He locks up his opponents but also has leveraged aid to really help socioeconomic conditions. E.g., the very close and productive collaboration with Partners in Health/Paul Farmer.
  - alephnerd 5mo ago
    Kagame cannot be compared to Park Chung Hee or LKY. Park's economic policies actually helped South Korea climb up the economic value chain, though a lot of that was also due to Japanese technology transfers to Korea in the 1960s-90s. On the other hand, Kagame's execution on economic reform has been a failure when compared against Uganda, as Uganda [0] has a significantly more complex (ie. higher value) economy than Rwanda [1] despite also suffering a severe civil war in the 1990s and dealing with the Idi Amin's kleptocratic rule in the 1980s. [0] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/800/export-basket https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/800/export-basket [1] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/646/export-basket https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/646/export-basket
    - edbaskerville 5mo ago
      Thanks, that's interesting. & that is a great website...

sofixa 5mo ago

There are a few things to note here. For both, around half of GDP is in the services sector. It doesn't matter that much what raw resources they export when it's a smaller portion of GDP (23% in Rwanda, 15% in Malawi). Also, almost all of those raw resources that Rwanda exports are stolen from the DRC by Rwanda-backed militias. Foreign aid, and Rwanda's ability to position itself geopolitically as a trusted stable partner (which enables more aid and for it to get away with theft and murder) have more impact than maize vs gold. And in the end, there are plenty of countries that have successfully developed and become less or not poor without having anything of serious value to export. From Bangladesh to the Balkans (I mean post-decolonisation Balkans, not post-Iron Curtain - it was mostly an area with subsistence farming as the main employment, disease, low rates of literacy and very low for higher education, frequent conflict and ethnic/religious tensions, few natural resources other than grain and some very limited amounts coal/minerals). If anything, it usually is the opposite, cf. the resource curse.

boelboel 5mo ago

There's barely any mines in Rwanda btw. DRC is closer to the later in terms of exports and I wouldn't say it's doing better.

ExpertAdvisor01 5mo ago
Rwanda controls significant amount of mines in eastern drc(north kivu) through the m23 rebels.

nearbuy 5mo ago

As the article states, that Malawi hasn't developed much industry or exports is more of a description of poverty than an explanation. Malawi can grow coffee, but mostly doesn't. They have rare earth element deposits, but little mining. Why haven't they developed more?

elmomle 5mo ago
Could it be that they haven't been so infected by the money bug that for now they still have a society oriented around happiness and maintaining traditional ways of life rather than economic attainment?
- abigail95 5mo ago
  Would you want to live there?
  - cylemons 5mo ago
    As a non Malawian no, but I do think its important to ask what the local sentiment of their country is.
- aaronbrethorst 5mo ago
  They're fourth from the bottom on the happiness index. https://mwnation.com/malawi-named-the-4th-least-happiest-country/ https://mwnation.com/malawi-named-the-4th-least-happiest-cou...
- jonathanlydall 5mo ago
  I live in South Africa and my gardener happens to be Malawian, as was a gardener my parents had when I was growing up. They’re both good people with pride in their work, but they are from poverty and have little in the way of skills except for manual labour jobs. They came to South Africa, like so many from nearby countries, as our significantly more developed economy offers far better earning opportunity. Not relevant to your comment, but want to also mention this creates xenophobic tension with the section of the local population which is in poverty as they feel their jobs are stolen. While there are certainly cases where people illegally employ immigrants to pay them less than locals, in cases where pay is at least equal, Zimbabweans and Malawians tend to have reputation of being more honest and hard working than the indigenous population. We have Nigerians come here too and by contrast they tend to be super scetchy.

pseudohadamard 5mo ago

I haven't been to Malawi but I've spent time in Lesotho which is in a fairly similar position: A nation made up mostly of peasant farmers barely surviving on small, not-very-productive plots that are heavily dependent on there being rain at the right time, a bit like a lot of central/eastern Europe 150+ years ago. There just isn't anything there to build on, you can't get taxes from someone with no money, you can't combine family-held plots into larger productive farms with the former landowners working as farm laborers - you could have a hundred years ago as an evil colonizer but not today - there's really no way out. On the other hand while the people had nothing, they didn't seem terribly upset by it. Everyone just got on with their lives, there was (compared to the surrounding South Africa) very little to no crime or violence, it was a poor but not miserable country. Do you need to be well-off to be happy?