President Kagame Challenges Religious Leaders to Tackle Rising Divorce Rate

President Paul Kagame expressed his concern regarding how two married people can fail to live together to the point of divorce, stating that people should exercise tolerance, and he tasked religious leaders with finding a lasting solution to the problem.

He made the remarks on February 1, 2026, while attending the National Prayer Breakfast, an event to pray for the Nation and give thanks to God, organized by the Rwanda Leaders Fellowship.

This year’s prayers were held under the theme: “Building a Capable and Secure Family.”

When addressing the attendees, President Kagame emphasized that couples living together should be tolerant of one another to build a family, and reiterated that he does not understand how two people living together can fail to coexist.

“How do two people fail to live together? …. People should tolerate each other. What is the sin one of them commits that makes the other one say, ‘I don’t want you anymore, leave here,’ what happened?” he questioned.

He went on to state that even if a problem arises, people should sit down and resolve it instead of separating, because they might find problems exceeding the initial ones where they are headed.

“But if it did happen, it’s possible, but shouldn’t people look each other in the eye, talk, and say, ‘You shouldn’t do this, don’t do it again,’ and even if they do it again tomorrow, you say, ‘But last time we were… But where will you go that you won’t find problems like this? Maybe you’ll find worse problems there. Worse than the ones here.”

He further highlighted that when a family breaks down, it has consequences for the country at large.

“Imagine the impact of that on two, two, three, four, five, 10 couples divorcing at the same time; then the country is done, it has collapsed. The country collapses. But these are things that can be managed. But if you believe in God, and you believe in prayer, you should pray about it.”

“You could sit down and pray about it, seek a solution, and find it, if you are not lying, really? If what you teach us, what you say, if you also believe it, where we go every morning, every evening following the teachings, what do those teachings benefit you if you can’t use them to overcome that anger, that badness, or being mean to each other? What do you get out of it if you can’t use it to bring peace to the family?”

He stressed that the problems within homes are a shared burden and that Rwandans should focus their efforts and be characterized by a spirit of responsibility.

“This is what we should put our efforts into, that Rwandans be characterized by that spirit, and I believe the country would continue to progress well, and the lesson we learned from our tragic history, let’s not waste it, to the point that a return to history could be possible because we were negligent or did not pay attention to these matters,” he concluded.

Religious leaders expressed satisfaction with the President’s advice and confirmed that their teachings will now heavily focus on building the family, as Pastor Ngendahayo Phocas, who prays at Christian Life Assembly in Nyarutarama, noted.

“The President re-emphasized the importance of having a well-built family. The family is made up of individuals, and individuals must be built up. Those people and the family constitute the country. He showed us that we must play a role in building the individual, but that individual must also know how to live with others.”

He added, “I would say President Kagame spoke more like an evangelist than a politician; the message he used today we clearly understood, and he also gave us a task that encourages us to continue doing what we are meant to do.”

A report from the Judiciary shows that in the 2024/2025 fiscal year, 2,674 cases of couples seeking separation were heard, down from 2,833 cases in the previous year.