In recent years, Rwanda has been praised by a large number of donors and development
experts for its recovery from the 1994 genocide, sustained economic growth and
improvement of many socioeconomic indicators, partly achieved thanks to massive aid flows.
A key feature of Rwanda’s progress is often considered to be governance and particularly
anti-corruption: the country is generally regarded as one of the least corrupt in Africa and a
success story in reducing corruption. This paper aims to analyze the state of corruption and
the wider governance context in Rwanda, attempting to evaluate whether the country’s
governance regime is an open access order characterized by ethical universalism, a limited
access order dominated by particularism, or a hybrid. After providing an overview of the
country’s anti-corruption framework, the paper analyses a number of governance aspects
and assesses the incidence of different forms of petty and grand corruption in a bid to
ascertain to which extent claims of Rwanda as an anti-corruption success story are wellfounded.