In a New York Times article today, the headline screams After So Many Deaths, Too Many Births. The country’s population has quadrupled over the last half-century. Today Rwanda has 8.8 million people; most are subsistence farmers. According to the article, if current fertility rates are not curbed — Rwandan women bear an average of 6.1 children — the population will double by 2030. That would almost certainly doom Mr. Kagame’s ambitious plan to raise Rwanda from poverty over that same period.

After the 1994 genocide, in which more than 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered, it seemed difficult to believe that overpopulation would ever be a problem. Yet Rwanda has long had more people than its meager resources and small area can support.

In a recent interview, President Paul Kagame said he was preparing a sweeping population control program, to be unveiled in the coming months, that would aim to cut Rwanda’s birth rate by at least half.

“We recognize we are late on this,” Mr. Kagame said.

After the genocide, officials were reluctant to promote population control because they feared it would offend the survivors, who believed they had a right to replenish what they had lost.

Officials designing the population control campaign say they hope to produce a plan that could become a model for other African countries, and perhaps persuade a foreign philanthropy to pay its entire cost. They have already begun consulting specialists from the United States and other countries.

Though Rwanda is predominantly Catholic, the church’s leaders here are not expected to oppose a campaign for population control. A number of priests, nuns and lay workers participated in the 1994 genocide, which weakened the church’s moral authority, and has led it to avoid politics.

President Kagame said he thought the church might present a problem, but noted that it had already showed a flexibility that might not have been expected on issues like AIDS education and condom distribution. “They do not come out and preach, as we do, but they do not actively oppose what we are doing,” he said.

According to Josh Ruxin, an American public health administrator based in Rwanda, the rate of Rwandans living in extreme poverty declined from 60.4 percent to 56.6 percent from 2001 to 2006. Mr. Ruxin is helping to design the new population control project. “If Rwanda wants to be an Asian tiger,” he said, “this is where it all starts.”

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