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Pioneering Development in Rwanda

When I first visited Rwanda in early 2008, the country’s aspiration to become a middle-income economy and an ICT and service hub in East Africa seemed to the sceptic in me to be unobtainable.

Three years on, Rwanda has proved me wrong.

I visited Kigali last week – my first trip in a few years – and the signs of change were everywhere. My flight from Nairobi was full; full of business people and honeymooning tourists where once it had been full of aid workers and missionaries. New roads criss-crossed Kigali’s city centre. Everywhere I looked there was construction underway, the sleepy low-rise town I remember is now dotted with gleaming new buildings like the recently completed Kigali Tower. When I first visited Rwanda, the shelves of the city’s only supermarket were empty – evidence of Rwanda’s land-locked existence and the punitive trade barriers within the East African Community. But now Rwanda feels commercially and technologically connected, like the regional hub it sought to become, a destination both for ambitious young people from its neighbouring EAC countries exercising their rights to visa-free entry, and for international investors and blue-chip firms.

These tangible signs of change are the result of policy strides Rwanda has taken in the past few years. In January, the Economist listed Rwanda as one of the top ten fastest growing economies of the last decade, with average growth of over 7% a year.  The 2010 World Bank “Doing Business” report cited Rwanda as the top global reformer – based on the reforms the Government has prioritised in the past 5 years ], which have also led to Rwanda now being named as the most competitive place to do business in East Africa by the WEF.

But as President Kagame is the first to say, there is still so much to be done. Half the population still live in poverty, and the scale of population growth threatens to wipe out the benefits of economic development. Outside the capital, markers for new fibre optic cable hint at a hi-tech future beyond Kigali, but the fact is, the majority of Rwandans still make their living from subsistence farming. Rwanda is ahead of many of its peers in meeting the MDGs – but the challenges which remain are vast. If they are to be overcome - and overcome from inside Rwanda rather than through the assistance of outsiders - then the capacity and tools for change need to be put into Rwandan hands. That’s the aim of the Strategic Capacity Building Initiative (SCBI) that the Rwandan government will soon be launching, with funding from the World Bank and the African Development Bank. The initiative will see capacity building support aligned behind priorities that the government itself has identified and wants to target, something AGI has been proud to be able to support.

I felt this desire for Rwandan ownership of their development agenda acutely throughout my visit. AGI’s interlocutors in government (who are, incidentally, a quite remarkable bunch of women) uniformly said one thing to me: we want your support because you listen to what we want to do, rather than imposing your own agenda, and because you work alongside us to help deliver the results we seek. In Rwanda, the purpose of the kind of capacity building we do at AGI is crystal clear – as the President said earlier this year at the launch of the SCBI, “Building institutions and capacity is not an end in itself but a means to political stability, economic growth and social inclusiveness and progress”.

During my trip, I listened to Paul Collier  speak to Rwandan politicians and public servants about the country’s prospects for economic development at the country’s first think tank, IPAR – an institution AGI helped to establish back in 2008. Paul’s excellent lecture touched on what I admire about Rwanda: as a nation, their aim is not simply to rebuild and recover after the horrific events of 1994, though achieving that is in itself nothing short of remarkable. Rwanda’s ambitions are for so much more. Rather than benchmarking themselves against their African peers, Rwanda wants to be best-in-class globally.

In 2008 I doubted their ability to transform themselves into a modern, connected service economy. I won’t make that mistake again – and I’m proud that AGI will be working with Rwanda to achieve their ambitious vision of a middle-income society, in which all of the Rwandan people benefit from this new economic opportunity.