Population of Rwanda and Ireland 1950-2050

Comparison of the population per square kilometre. United Nations Population Division.

Rwanda is a little more than one third the size of Ireland. Land areas 24,948 sq km and 68,890 sq km respectively.

Population estimates:

	Rwanda	Ireland
1950	2.2m	2.9m
2000	8m	3.8m
2050	19m	5.3m

 

“I was born in what was then called Ruanda-Urundi. In 1941 there were around two million inhabitants. Fifty-three years later, when my boyhood friend Husi and his Belgian wife were slaughtered along with 800,000 others in the Rwanda genocide, there were nearly eight million people in that landlocked and resource-poor country. Population, poverty and violence are connected. While the GDP of Rwanda, like other African countries, had actually increased somewhat, the enormous increase in population meant that per-person share of land, their only real source of wealth, had declined dramatically.”

John Guillebaud (Emeritus Professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health University College London)

Letter to The Times 16 May 2005