Minister for Youth and ICT, Jean-Philbert Nsengimana, today reaffirmed the role of Rwanda’ technological advance in addressing key society challenges.

He was addressing the 19th International Telecommunication Union (ITU) conference in Busan, South Korea, which attracted over 3,000 delegates from 175 countries states.

"In Rwanda ICT is helping to educate the next generation with initiatives such as the One Laptop per Child, which have played a major role in our efforts to be among the countries that are on course to meet all Millennium Development Goals,” he said.

"Technology today represents one of the major weapons in the fight against poverty. In the same way roads and railways were for the agrarian and industrial revolution, ICT is undoubtedly the infrastructure of the present and future knowledge economy.”

Nsengimana added that Rwanda believes in the transformative potential of technology, and has over the last 10 years worked with ITU to create sustainable infrastructure that enables socio-economic transformation through technology.

"The Smart Africa Manifesto puts ICT at the center of national socio-economic development agenda. African leaders rightfully acknowledged ICT's transformative power to increase productivity of other sectors like agriculture, Education, Healthcare, Government effectiveness and transparency, Business and other key sectors,” he said.

In 2007, Rwanda hosted ITU’s Connect Africa Summit, and according to information from the ICT Ministry, the summit attracted a fund of US$ 70 billion dollar being pledged towards broadband infrastructure in Africa over the next five years.

Rwanda and ITU again hosted the Transform Africa Summit last year, with an objective to attract US$300 billion investments in the African ICT initiatives.