Making Rwanda more competitive

Friday, the Prime Minister, Dr Pierre Damien Habumuremyi, said that the Government of Rwanda will ensure that new roads that are being constructed in different parts of the country last for at least twenty years before any repairs are carried out. This, he said, is one way of curbing wastage of taxpayers’ money. He was speaking during the Government Accountability Day.There is hope that with construction of better transport infrastructure, increased electric power access and better service delivery, the country will be in a better position to compete regionally and internationally. Yet to some outsiders, the image of Rwanda’s tragic events of 1994 still lingers on in their minds. So selling Rwanda has been a pretty hard job. But the story of the recovery of Rwanda is giving this country a new image. Besides the well-known cleanliness of Kigali and good security, there are other ‘items on sale’ in Rwanda, including tourism which has become key to rebuilding the economy.Rwanda is today carefully and systematically applying the principles of competitiveness. Competitiveness is broadly viewed as a measure of any nation’s advantage in selling its products in international markets. Competitiveness has been used most recently to describe the overall economic performance of a nation with respect to the level of productivity and ability to export its goods and services.The idea is that, Rwanda, like a company, can study an industry, in this case tourism, analyze its potential clients, and pursue a niche with an “unbeatable product”. The ‘unbeatable product’ of Rwanda in this case is ecotourism, which is based on its variety of primates, an asset unique in the world. The North West of Rwanda happens to be a habitat for the mountain gorillas, and Southern Rwanda is home to thirteen other types of primates as well as the Nyungwe forests, one of the surviving high-altitude rainforests in the world which is also source of River Nile! The mountain gorillas of the Virunga, where more than half of the world’s population live, are some of the rarest primates in the world. It is worth noting that it was on the Rwandan slopes of the Virungas that the late Dian Fossey studied gorilla behaviour for almost two decades, and on these very same bamboo-covered slopes that the acclaimed movie, Gorillas in the Mist, was shot in September 1988. The movie tells the true-life story of Dian Fossey’s work in Rwanda with Mountain Gorillas and was nominated for five academy awards.Competition “is not about cheap prices, cheap labour, or lowering taxes. Nor is it about accessing markets”. These elements are in fact part of competitiveness, which integrates all of them toward the specific goal of producing and selling good-quality, high-margin products and services to demanding clients both at home and abroad.Holland is an example that can inspire Rwanda. It has high-cost labour and no sunshine and yet it remains the world’s number one exporter of flowers. There are more than 12 research centres in horticulture in Europe and all of them are in Holland.Rwanda’s strategy is to understand the dynamics of tourism. Rwanda’s neighbours are all selling the same tourism experience – safaris. Rwanda appears to have learned that success in tourism is not measured in the number of arrivals of visitors. It is the receipts and not competition on safaris. So Rwanda’s tourism could not be mainstream. The starting point for Rwanda is, therefore, in the North West, home to the rare mountain gorillas. It is not the mountain gorillas that this country’s tourism should be based on. The spectacular scenery, which a friend described as hauntingly beautiful, with brilliant views over a beautiful mountain range, makes one realize why Rwanda is better known as the “the Land of a Thousand Hills”.But to base tourism on gorillas alone is not enough to build an industry that generates employment for the average Rwandan. Tourists who visit Rwanda are passionate about primates. The country’s ecotorism product enables it to keep people in the country on average of seven days. The target here is not the backpackers with a shoestring budget. We are talking about surgeons from New York and big time business people with disposable incomes from all over the world. These are people with money to fly in on private jets. These eco-tourists are demanding. They want, for instance, to interact with scientists who understand the behaviour of primates.What all this will require is coordination and establishing infrastructure, training and education for tour guides and all those in the tourism industry.

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Making Rwanda more competitive