Rwanda on clear growth path to knowledge based economy

Editor, This is with reference to the story, “Google, Face book top executives to attend Transform Africa ICT summit,” published in The New Times on October 25.When I sit down and remember the past, I’m surprised by where we came from and I must say kudos to the Government of Rwanda. We have come so far, but we still have a long journey ahead.Rwanda is a landlocked country, and I think that’s why our visionary leadership found it wise to drive the nation towards a knowledge-based economy. For them, they know very well that, once more than 10 million minds of Rwanda turned into formidable brains, We will achieve whatever we have set our sights on.You go to a certain place and you meet a woman who’s building the foundation of a bright future by being a mobile money agent. These people are given basic skills for mobile transactions and voila how technology is transforming their lives.I know a young man who looked for a job everywhere to no avail. The guy was a fresh graduate from university. I don’t know who advised him, but one day he woke up and decided to ‘bury’ himself into books to enrich his skills for dynamic web development. After acquiring some of the skills, he decided to take a bold decision.He went to Rwanda Development Board (RDB) to register his online company and was up and running in 24 hours. He started by offering web hosting by widely marketing himself on every social media platforms that you can possibly think of. At this time, he knew that he had retained some clients who will pay him every year. That’s when he engaged himself into web development and he’s now making a lot of money. He runs his business on the laptop and doesn’t pay any rent because he has an exclusively online company.If the government had not invested in the necessary infrastructure, I don’t know what would have been the fate of that young man and others like him. The backbone is there, and it’s up to us to benefit from that. We have everything to build an empire from that, especially nowadays where you can register a company under six hours, and for free of charge if you apply online.Apart from economic transformation, Information Technology is also a vehicle for good governance whereby it is bringing Rwandans together with their leaders. One example is Village Urugwiro, the Office of the President, and the President himself. They are highly responsive whenever interacting with citizens.As I said earlier, we still have a long way to go. We still need businesses, such as Amazon, in order to order things online without leaving your desk; we need our fibre optic to really do (in other countries they even watch TV connecting to fibre optic outlet in the wall) what it’s supposed to do and feed the whole country. And we need our MPs to be on Twitter and facebook. We need to interact with them.MutaraIntore, Kigali

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Rwanda on clear growth path to knowledge based economy