Reflections from Rwanda’s Innovation Space

But on this Saturday, the rains are starting to pour in Kigali. The clouds are blackening and the RwandAir bombardier in which I sit is toughening up against a turbulence. Some of the passengers are downed into a hysterical chant of ‘God save us’ but it’s hard not to notice that this turbulence is also saving farmers whose crops, from the sky are yellowing in the brown dirt soils.

Kigali has grown in leaps and bounds. A day after my arrival, I sit in the room as the National census is released and it shows the life expectancy for the average Rwandan has gone up to 69 years – one of the highest in the region.

There are things, if you visit the Rwandan society frequently that they get right; one is health insurance for citizens and another is a firm insistence on human dignity which forces the population to work, earn and maintain their individual dignity. After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi which the RPF stopped, Kigali was deserted and only a home to international NGO’s and aid networks. In a short two decades, Rwandans have worked to reverse that trend posting good economic numbers, getting a lot of their children into school, turning a complicated topography into an agricultural hub and now, positioning the country as a continental pitstop for business.

The World bank ranks Rwanda 38th in the world in the Ease of doing business, the second in Africa and the only low income country in that category. It is also the cheapest place in the world to start a business – but still, I learn later at Umushyikirano, that the leadership isn’t quite content with those numbers. The President Paul Kagame has insisted to one of his longest serving civil servants Clare Akamanzi that the ‘One Stop Centre’ must work and that it must be efficient. The deadline for that, hold your breath, is seven days.

It is also evident that this pressure is working because later as I hang out at Norrsken, an innovation hub, I notice a cocktail of nationalities who’ve since come here to do some impressive work in solving African problems.

Young Africans, in enabling environments like Rwanda will do impressive things for the continent – no doubt. The only catch is, the wealth they create will need very creative and firm ways of being retained mostly for them. I ask Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame about this and he says it’s the task for leaders on the continent to take on.

To run efficient states and provide a large basket of goods for it’s populations, African countries have got to raise tax revenue big enough to cart them off from reliance on foreign aid. And that tax revenue will come from African innovators who’ve designed solutions that create wealth. It is, if anything, the pressing mission of a generation.

I’m hovering down into Kigali on a Saturday afternoon. The gods of East Africa had held back the rains for the better part of four months from November.

A roasting sun burnt up the region drying out plantations in Kenya, reducing Somalia to a hunger crisis, triggering a food race in South Sudan, and causing inflation of food prices in Uganda. On the social scene, the sun reduced what were intellectual tiffs on the internet to moaning cries for a little rain – everywhere in the region.

But this Saturday, the rains are starting to pour in Kigali. The clouds are blackening and the RwandAir bombardier in which I sit is toughening up against turbulence. Some of the passengers are downed into a hysterical chant of ‘God save us’ but it’s hard not to notice that this turbulence is also saving farmers whose crops, from the sky, are yellowing in the brown dirt soils.

Kigali has grown in leaps and bounds. A day after my arrival, I sit in the room as the National census is released and it shows the life expectancy for the average Rwandan has gone up to 69 years – one of the highest in the region.

There are things, if you visit the Rwandan society frequently that they get right; one is health insurance for citizens and another is a firm insistence on human dignity which forces the population to work, earn and maintain their individual dignity. After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi which the RPF stopped, Kigali was deserted and only home to international NGOs and aid networks. In a short two decades, Rwandans have worked to reverse that trend by posting good economic numbers, getting a lot of their children into school, turning a complicated topography into an agricultural hub, and now, positioning the country as a continental pitstop for business.

The World Bank ranks Rwanda 38th in the world in the Ease of doing business, the second in Africa, and the only low-income country in that category. It is also the cheapest place in the world to start a business – but still, I learn later at Umushyikirano, that the leadership isn’t quite content with those numbers. President Paul Kagame has insisted to one of his longest-serving civil servants Clare Akamanzi that the ‘One Stop Centre’ must work and that it must be efficient. The deadline for that, hold your breath, is seven days.

It is also evident that this pressure is working because later as I hang out at Norrsken, an innovation hub, I notice a cocktail of nationalities who’ve since come here to do some impressive work in solving African problems.

Young Africans, in enabling environments like Rwanda will do impressive things for the continent – no doubt. The only catch is, the wealth they create will need very creative and firm ways of being retained mostly for them. I ask Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame about this and he says it’s the task for leaders on the continent to take on.

To run efficient states and provide a large basket of goods for their populations, African countries have got to raise tax revenue big enough to cart them off from reliance on foreign aid. And that tax revenue will come from African innovators who’ve designed solutions that create wealth. It is, if anything, the pressing mission of a generation.