Living Life : Your role in our service economy

Rwanda has chosen an intelligent advantage of setting its economy apart from the rest of its gigantic neighbours that every Rwandan should take full advantage off. It’s a clever path especially for a landlocked country which depends on its larger neighbours for crucial access to the sea and cheaper manufactured goods to choose to the way of a service economy. A service economy is one that is essentially based on services instead of tangible goods. As the country develops and people’s incomes increase, they require all kinds of services to ease their lives. For example, has it ever occurred to you that there are so many barber shops which keep opening up and almost none closing? Service is an indispensable part of every product being offered for sale and the customer pays the price of the service that he expects, inclusive in the cost he pays for the product. No wonder you hear state functionaries talking about tourism or a conference hub, where people come in and use money, leaving it in the economy and instead take away experiences, as opposed to say exporting gold or coffee which is a result of tangible loss in form of exports of a mineral or a fertilizer/soil nutrient. For Rwanda’s case, the focus is even more particularly in knowledge-based areas such as ICT. So as a young Rwandan, you should not be so worried about how trained labour from neighbouring countries is going to out-compete you for a job. Instead, as others think of exporting goods from their countries into Rwanda for a profit, you should be thinking about giving people a service that you can offer cheaper than any foreigner or competitor for that matter. A service economy needs enough of the right ingredients to make it the right environment at the right time to do so. Those ingredients—changes that eased its regulatory environment, good infrastructure, can create employment opportunities along with enhancing the production capacity of an economy. Consumer and business services such as food service, lodging, transportation, logistics, distribution, health care and beauty can be tapped in a service economy. Sometimes you don’t have to look for a completely new idea, but in differentiating services that are available to target only a small niche. For example it does not matter that there are ten restaurants in Kiyovu which is perceived to be a location for wealthy people or affluent businesses. But a savvy entrepreneur will see that all those businesses/homes have workers who have smaller budgets and smaller restaurant businesses with simple foods and less fancy finishing might make more money because of more customers who perhaps did not have anywhere to have a meal before. With time this small business with small profit margins can become more successful than the many big restaurants that target a few wealthy people. As the Rwanda service economy opens up, your role will only be defined by how witty you are and how different you are ready to think from the rest. You have to be ready to think ‘deeper and better’ in order to spot opportunities that everybody is literally stepping over. I wish you a thoughtful Sunday. kelviod@yahoo.com