Abstract: Street vending activity is considered as an important source of informal employment resulting from lack of limited lucrative employment, hence leading many people to move from their villages to cities searching for employment where they expect to get better pay. In Rwanda, the street vending activity is considered as illegal under the motive of keeping clean Kigali City and the secondary cities. To attend to living conditions of people involved in the street vending activities, Government of Rwanda has initiated a project of locating them in formal markets. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the contribution of this initiative of locating street traders in formal markets on their living conditions. It employed a descriptive study design on a sample of 372 street traders drawn from around 4,647 street vendors relocated in formal market in Kigali City. With the F-statistic of 27.617 and p-value of 0.000, findings confirm that locating street vendors at a well-known market and safer place has a significant effect on the improvement of their living conditions at all levels of significance. However, the amount of Frw 50,000 given to street vendors as starting up assistance is perceived as small to sustain their business. Similarly, the backward movement of some to street vending activity is to be strictly discouraged because not only hamper the initiative but also can reduce the potential multiplicative effect of the amount that government gives as support to located street vendors.

Received May30, 2020; Reviewed June5, 2020; Accepted June7, 2020

Abstract:This study evaluated the impact of microfinance non-financial services on the socio-economic and environmental status (SEES) of low-income households in Kicukiro District, Rwanda. Precisely, it examined “the extent to which SEES of deep-rooted MFI clients exceeds that of non-MFI clients in Kicukiro District, Rwanda.” This study is impartant due to the fact that the non-financial services coupled to financial services allow low-income households to optimally invest, aquire productive assets and increase their management skills.The study used mixed methods research to attain the objective. It collected quantitative data using a structured questionnaire (schedules) from the intervention group of 389 households (deep-rooted MFI clients) and a regulator group of 111 households (non-MFI clients) . This research used SPSS version 22 for quantitative analysis. The correlation analysis revealed that the microfinance NFS affects the SEES at (0.073) Pearson correlation coefficient with 0.152 p-values. The independent t-test showed that, on average, the SEES of deep-rooted MFI clients was 2.246 million SEES higher than that of the non-MFI clients; t (249.47) = 5.83 with p = .000. This study used NVivo 10 to analyze data from in-depth interviews and focus group discussions thematically. The qualitative findings triangulate the quantitative results. This study concludes that microfinance non-financial services have a low negative and insignificant impact. It recommends that MFIs should make sure that they associate non-financial with financial services. Moreover, policymakers and regulators should reinforce the policy to promote much more non-financial services models to enhance the financial capabilities of their clientele.