Economic Activities
Senior 1 · Geography
Economic Activities
Lesson 1 of 4
22 min
A worker on a hillside in Nyabihu picks tea leaves. A few kilometres away, a factory withers, rolls and dries them. A lorry carries the tea to Kigali, a bank pays the factory, and a shop sells a packet to a family. Five people, five jobs, one product. Geographers sort all this work into three groups, and Figure 1 shows how much each group adds to Rwanda's economy.
Figure 1. Rwanda's economy by sector, 2025. Drawn by Ganzaa from NISR's GDP National Accounts 2025.
Definition
Economic activity: any work that people do to produce goods or provide services in exchange for money, or to meet their own needs. Example: growing beans to sell, driving a moto taxi, teaching, or running a mobile-money kiosk.
Definition
Gross domestic product (GDP): the total value of all the goods and services produced in a country in one year. Example: Rwanda's GDP in 2025 was Frw 23,387 billion.
| Sector | What people do | Examples in Rwanda |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | Take raw materials directly from nature | Growing tea, coffee, beans and bananas; keeping cattle; forestry; mining cassiterite, coltan and wolframite; fishing for isambaza on Lake Kivu |
| Secondary | Turn raw materials into finished goods (manufacturing), build, and produce power | Tea factories; coffee washing stations; breweries and dairies; cement works; construction; hydroelectric and methane power stations |
| Tertiary | Provide services to people and businesses | Banking and mobile money; markets and shops; transport; schools and universities; hospitals; tourism such as gorilla trekking |
In NISR's figures, "agriculture" is the primary sector (mining and quarrying are counted inside "industry"), "industry" is mainly the secondary sector, and "services" is the tertiary sector. Some geographers add a fourth, quaternary, sector for research, ICT and information work.
Definition
Primary activity: work that takes raw materials directly from the land, water or ground. Example: picking tea in Nyamasheke; fishing on Lake Kivu.
Definition
Secondary activity: work that processes raw materials into finished products, or builds things. Example: turning green tea leaves into black tea at a factory.
Definition
Tertiary activity: work that provides a service rather than a product. Example: a teacher, a nurse, a bank clerk or a tour guide.
Worked example 1: reading and checking the pie chart
Services produced Frw 12,238 billion of Rwanda's Frw 23,387 billion GDP in 2025. (a) What percentage is that? (b) What angle should its slice have?
Answer. 52.3%, and a slice of about 188°: just over half the circle, as Figure 1 shows. The same method gives about 79° for industry and 73° for agriculture.
Worked example 2: GDP per person
NISR estimates Rwanda's population in 2025 at 14.2 million. Find GDP per person.
Answer. About Frw 1.65 million per person per year (NISR gives Frw 1,652,000, about US$1,156). This is an average: it does not show how income is shared between people.
Figure 2. Some economic activities located. Tea districts from Wikipedia's Tea production in Rwanda; park outlines from OpenStreetMap.
Important
Case study: reading the pattern in Figure 2
Warning
Processing is secondary, not primary. Picking tea is primary; drying and packing it in a factory is secondary, even if the factory stands in the middle of the tea estate. Selling or transporting the tea is tertiary. Classify the activity, not the place or the product.
What's the difference between primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary industries?, by Geography Hawks (5 min). For each example in the video, think of a Rwandan job in the same sector.
Seven in ten Rwandans live in rural areas, where most families farm, yet services now produce more than half of GDP. How can a sector employ fewer people but produce more value? Think about what one bank clerk and one farmer each produce in a year.
Tip
P-S-T = Pick, Shape, Serve. Primary picks from nature, secondary shapes it into goods, tertiary serves people. Follow one product (tea, coffee, milk) through all three.
Practice
Remember
Sources and credits
The lesson text, chart, map, table, worked examples and practice are written by Ganzaa.
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
