As part of activities and initiatives aimed at helping the country achieve its desired targets in science and technology using research and innovation, the government recently launched the National Research and Innovation Fund (NRIF).

The Fund comes in time to complement other programs that are aimed at the government’s development agenda.

The Executive Secretary for the National Council for Science and Technology (NCST) Professor Manasse Mbonye sat with The New Times’ Julius Bizimungu and told him why science and technology are essential tools in the country’s pursuit of increased economic growth and transformation.

Below are excerpts.

Help us to unpack Rwanda’s Science Agenda.

As you know, the government of Rwanda has chosen to evolve into a knowledge-based economy. This choice implies that the nation applies science and technology to drive research-based innovation to boost the economy.

Our responsibility as a council right now is to make sure that the science, technology, research and innovation policy for Rwanda is implemented with the right results.

How are you doing this?

Essentially, the National Council for Science and Technology advises the government on policies, legislation and regulation as well as monitoring the implementation of the policies. We also facilitate the establishment of national priorities for science, technology, research and innovation and the modalities for financing such activities.

What are you specifically doing with this science agenda?

What science and technology does is to boost the economy through modernizing the national innovation system, which is what we are doing.

We want to apply science and technology through research and innovation to our existing national innovation system. The national innovation systems are terms used to characterise the activities that the nation is engaging in that result into economic growth.

For Rwanda’s case, what are some of these activities?

If you go back hundreds of years ago, Rwandans knew how to cultivate their crops and they would exchange their yield for something else that they needed. They knew how to look after their cattle and get milk, they also knew how to brew beer and how to engage in the art of pottery. That was our social innovation system.

These things within this system are the ones that need to be improved further so we can improve the economy.

How would you describe our innovation system at the moment?

Our innovation system is often very unscientific. In other words, when people do things they may not always be replicated in an authentic way and they may not be reproduced on a large scale.

Similarly, our national innovation system is generally uncoordinated, poorly funded and often poorly monitored and evaluated.

When we say we want to advance our innovation system, it’s these things that we are talking about and they are the same ones that science and technology must effect and improve.

It is, therefore, necessary to have a well-coordinated approach for research and innovation because it is the only way to reap benefits.

For instance, as of now, the nation has a number of research centres but they are poorly funded and uncoordinated.

What are some of these centres?

We have an agricultural centre at the Rwanda Agriculture Board (RAB), we have got the National Industrial Research and Development Agency (NIRDA), we have the Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC), and there is the Rwanda Information Society Authority (RISA).

We also have centres of excellence at the University of Rwanda like a centre for the Internet of Things, energy, biodiversity, data sciences, and a centre of excellence for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM).

But what we want is not to just have all these things. One wants to make sure that these things are productive, and their productivity is in line with the developmental goals of the nation.

Again, this is what proper coordination does.

It is possible that one of these centres could be engaged in research that is not different from what another one is engaged in, and both of them are funded by the government.

Here, we don’t have enough resources necessary and neither do we have enough time that the West had. For the past 300 years, the West has spent a lot of resources doing very interesting and sometimes along the way, experiments that never worked.

What we need to learn from them is that most of that science is done. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and we should make sure the science we engage in at this time is science that is relevant for our economic development.

We don’t have the 300 years to spend like they had.

But what can we learn from them when it comes to coordination?

In the West, the whole idea of coordination of science and technology is not a big deal, they rather compete.

When you closely look at their system, you realise that they don’t necessarily need this coordination because the things that have happened over time are numerous in such a way that the system looks after itself.

However, that was not always the case. At the turn of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the United States was in very bad shape with regard to its agricultural output.

They had a big number of people involved in subsistence farming while at the same time producing little. What they did was to deliberately set up agricultural centres. Today, most of the big universities in the North-East of the US started off as agricultural centres.

They started off with a responsibility to make breakthroughs in agriculture. They went and set up studies in agriculture mechanics for extensive farming, they set up schools to teach research in regard to crop-improvement and to teach agronomy.

In a short time, what came out is right now surprising. What came out was the ability for the United States to become food-secure.

This indicates that when people engage in well-coordinated activities, good things can happen.

Africa was once home to mathematics, music and other inventions. Would you say the biggest problem was coordination?

Yes, we could not compete because we became uncoordinated. And we are not the only ones.

The Arabs too. They invented algebra and other things but all these things died on the way, because there was no well-coordinated approach to developing science and technology.

What is Rwanda doing to coordinate science?

We have set up what we think are prerequisites for using science and technology to develop. One of them was to come up with a policy for science, technology, research and innovation. It is ready.

In this policy, we have studied our national innovation system and its ecosystem which means figuring out who is doing what and where. In fact, we just finished an important survey, the Rwanda Research and Innovation Survey, and we are now analysing the results.

We are doing this to know where we are before we can engage in organised research management, so that five years from now, we can look back and ask what science has done for us.

To make sure that this is realised, we have also set up the national research and innovation agenda, and this will inform us about what we need to do so as to develop.

To drive the entire agenda, we have set up the National Research and Innovation Fund (NRFI) which comes to fund research, among other things. We have spent over a year setting up the framework for this fund.

What challenges will the Agenda address? 

In this country, we have many problems that need science and technology. However, we figured out that we can’t describe and define each and every problem because they can get ti into millions.

What the agenda is helping do is to categorise the nature of challenges that we have, and then apply certain approaches of science and technology to solve those problems.

For instance, some of the problems need urgent need-based research to be solved. With things like floods and other climate change problems, we don’t have very good methods of dealing with them.

For example, there are problems of limited access to water.  It has started to be dry like in the Eastern Province and predictions show that this trend is likely to continue, yet we don’t have right ways to respond.

On the other hand, we have an emphasis on applied research whose main aim is to support and sustain manufacturing. Right now, our manufacturing base is virtually at zero, and there are several reasons for this. One of them is that our energy is low and still expensive. We need to look for alternative ways of energy.

We are also focusing on fundamental research which means that we are trying to look for ways to invest in research that will enable us to make inventions like phones, gadgets and other things. Investment in this research will enable us to compete in the long-term.

Generally, the problems we want to solve are contributing to realising growth in the country’s priority sectors. These are problems to do with food security, health, ICT, environment, energy, among others.

Can we talk a little bit about the research and innovation fund?

The Fund is basically going to help us drive the agenda through strengthening capacity building and financing research and innovation.

For instance, how do you train engineers to become innovators? Because right now, engineers are now coming out of the university and failing to get jobs.

The reason why this is happening is because our industrial base is low and it cannot accommodate all the people graduating. At the same time, when graduates come out, hit the market and don’t find jobs, they will bounce and go back to being unemployed. This is because they were never taught to innovate.

The Fund will help empower Rwandan students all the way from their time of joining college.

Beyond this, it will enable us to work with different researchers to promote specific projects underlined within the priority sectors. These will be government projects or those from private sector or academia.

For people to access the Fund, we shall call for proposals once we need a certain project or research project to be worked on.

What’s the growth target for the fund?

We want the growth of the fund to be around 1 per cent of the total GDP between 2020 and 2022 but the long-term projection is to be at about 4 per cent by 2050. Currently, South Korea, Singapore, and Finland are among the giants that are at 4 per cent who we’ll be following. This means that each of that country is spending 4 per cent of their GDP on science and technology research.

editorial@newtimes.co.rw