Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is a key region for the success of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. However, there is no consensus about the contribution of Official Development Assistance (ODA) in the promotion of economic growth and the reduction of extreme poverty in this region. We therefore build an analytical framework of the distorting effects of foreign aid, and make the subsequent estimations during the period 1991-2014 for SSA. We find four main results: i) ODA to SSA has exerted both distorting and stimulating effects on growth but the latter effects were larger than the former; ii) increasing both aid grants and aid loans, and increasing the ratio of loans to grants, may induce higher growth; iii) however, such a reallocation may only be positive in countries with sustainable debt burdens; and iv) although ODA was effective in aggregate terms, it did not significantly boost the mean income corrected from inequality, which reveals a grave distributional deficiency.

As Rwanda is achieving its vision of moving from a low to a middle–income country during the period 2000–2020, its capability of ending poverty along the Sustainable Development Goals’ era (2015–2030) mostly depends on how well the increasing prosperity will be shared among Rwandans along the way up to the 2030 horizon. Knowing those who have not yet benefited enough from the ongoing progress should help Rwanda’s policy makers and other development agencies to serve that purpose. With this perspective, this work has the two major objectives of estimating poverty by sector and studying the relationship between poverty and related variables in Rwanda. We tackle the first objective with the Small Area Estimation method (SAE) and covers the second with the Poisson regression. We find that (1) most of the very poor are located within rural areas, (2) live in larger households and, (3) have female household heads.