A few weeks ago, social media was lit up with debate about unemployment in Rwanda. Some netizens were expressing frustration that numbers were being cooked as a ploy to attract good press. 

Riding on these currents, some interlocutors lashed out at the government drone initiative with Zipline to deliver blood and medical supplies. Questions like: Drones are overkill, why don’t we deliver these supplies on motorbikes? The argument being made was that motorbikes would create jobs, unlike the attention-seeking drone initiative.

This reasoning, with many points of merit, is hardly new. Given my line of work in the e-government space, I hear related questions quite a bit: why digitize government services before the entire country is connected to broadband? In fact, when Schumpeter published "Look before you leap” in The Economist in August, it was implied that leapfrogging,by skipping to drones before taking care of our roads,was akin to jumping in blind faith and would hardly be sustainable.

At the heart of this discourse is a question akin to the chicken or the egg causality dilemma: Which comes first, the chicken – technological advancement, or the egg -infrastructural and regulatory development? 

For starters, it is not a zero-sum game. But I will go out on a limb and say that in Rwanda, we may need to produce a brood of chickens before the egg! Why?Rwanda is a landlocked country with few natural resources; is the most densely populated nation on the continent; and just under half of that population is under 15 years old.

This spells a number of things, of which I will list a few;

Many (very many) jobs need to be created for a bulging youth demographic, and fast; agricultural productivity has to increase multifold to feed a growing population, manage land pressure and maintain political stability; and given our lot from nature, we need to figure out a way to become a middle income economy without the luxuries of natural resources…cue Vision 2040 to become a knowledge based economy.

Our knowledge economy as a driver of productivity and economic growth shall mostly be powered by investments in high-tech industries, and shall require highly-skilled labor to reap required productivity gains.

This means that there’s no better time than now to attract these investments and innovations which shall create the multiplier effects, through knowledge and technology diffusion, to cultivate a knowledge economy.

With this background, one cannot be myopic about the partnership with Zipline. The introduction of innovative technologies comes with more than the direct benefits of higher efficiency: I hope we can all agree that delivering blood and medical supplies to hospitals faster is of undeniable primacy – the means (drone or motorbike) being secondary to this.

Ancillary benefits include the creation of high skill jobs like engineers and technicians; its potential applications to solutions in other sectors such as agriculture; the fact that such startup technologies enable follow on innovations (Zipline staff come from Google, SpaceX, to mention a few –an example of the spinoff effect of innovation and job creation).

Often times, these indirect effects on the economy cannot be sufficiently captured in economic stats, but are widely acknowledged to drive the productivity of economies.

Innovation requires vision, leadership and a great dose of risk-taking. That the government is walking the talk in thisis commendable and to be blunt, necessary.With four years left to Vision 2020, and given the geo-socio-economic context of our country, we must run where others can walk.

Government support accelerates the necessary regulatory reforms to adopt new innovations, and reassures investors and innovators. It’s also worth noting that infrastructure development is taking place in tandem.

But as we run we must keep our eyes open. Rwanda is favorable as a test bed because of size, political support, ease of doing business, etcetera, but we must ensure that we are also a breeding ground, where companies invest heavily in knowledge transfer and long-term market presence.

Private and public players must harness the opportunity by maximizing investments in tech:the net gains in improving lives and driving efficiency can only be achieved then.

One may ask: what about the fact that technology/productivity in some instances, results in reduced need for human workers, resulting in shedding jobs? I shall address this in the next article. Have a great weekend!

The writer is a tech enthusiast based in Kigali