Rwanda's way forward is through investment, not foreign assistance

TO BE NOTED: From UN Dispatch:

"Rwanda's mHealth Boom John Boonstra - May 13, 2009 - 2:03pm

Philip Gourevitch is not the only one who's traveled to Rwanda recently and appreciated the extent to which it's "a country looking and moving forward, not back." This eyes-on-Singapore approach is particularly evident in the field of technology. The UN Foundation's Claire Thwaites reports on one of Rwanda's more encouraging public health-related tech developments:

Supported by the Rwandan Ministry of Health, Voxiva, and the Treatment Research and AIDS Centre (TRAC), TRACnet is an electronic records system that can be uploaded to mobile phones. In Masaka it is being used to track and record the distribution of anti-retroviral medications, ensure drug adherence, electronically create and submit patient reports, and access the most up-to-date information about HIV/AIDS care and treatment.

[snip]

In Masaka, I was guided through the health clinic by the local program manager, Hareuhana Diaedonne. During the tour, Hareuhana spoke at length about the simple but significant benefits that have been brought about by the introduction of mobile phones to the local healthcare system. Using TRACnet, he reported, data entry that used to take months to record and aggregate now can be collected in just 5 minutes.

President Paul Kagame has made a point to emphasize that he thinks Rwanda's way forward is through investment, not foreign assistance. Pushing mobile health technology seems like a perfect opportunity to both attract investment and improve the quality of the country's public health care system."

Aid has not only often failed to meet its objectives; it has also rarely dealt with the underlying issues of poverty and weak societies

TO BE NOTED: From the FT:

"Africa has to find its own road to prosperity

By Paul Kagame

Published: May 7 2009 19:35 | Last updated: May 7 2009 19:35

At recent meetings of the Group of 20 and the International Monetary Fund, world leaders have gathered to discuss the global economic crisis. Unfortunately, it seems that many still believe they can solve the problems of the poor with sentimentality and promises of massive infusions of aid, which often do not materialise. We who live in, and lead, the world’s poorest nations are convinced that the leaders of the rich world and multilateral institutions have a heart for the poor. But they also need to have a mind for the poor.

Dambisa Moyo’s controversial book, Dead Aid, has given us an accurate evaluation of the aid culture today. The cycle of aid and poverty is durable: as long as poor nations are focused on receiving aid they will not work to improve their economies. Some of Ms Moyo’s prescriptions, such as ending all aid within five years, are aggressive. But I always thought this was the discussion we should be having: when to end aid and how best to end it.

Aid has not only often failed to meet its objectives; it has also rarely dealt with the underlying issues of poverty and weak societies. We see this with our neighbour, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There, 17,000 United Nations peacekeepers – the largest and most expensive presence of its kind in history – treat the symptoms rather than addressing the issues of capacity, self-determination and dignity.

Often, aid has left recipient populations unstable, distracted and more dependent; as Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister of Afghanistan, has pointed out, it can even sever the relationship between democratically elected leadership and the populace.

Do not get me wrong. We appreciate support from the outside, but it should be support for what we intend to achieve ourselves. No one should pretend that they care about our nations more than we do; or assume that they know what is good for us better than we do ourselves. They should, in fact, respect us for wanting to decide our own fate.

At the same time, as I tell our people, nobody owes Rwandans anything. Why should anyone in Rwanda feel comfortable that taxpayers in other countries are contributing money for our well­being or development? Rwanda is a nation with high goals and a sense of purpose. We are attempting to increase our gross domestic product by seven times over a generation, which increases per capita incomes fourfold. This will create the basis for further innovation and foster trust, civic-mindedness and tolerance, strengthening our society.

Entrepreneurship is the surest way for a nation to meet these goals. Michael Fairbanks’ book, In The River They Swim, which uses Rwanda as one of its examples, highlights the need to respect local wisdom, build a culture of innovation and create investment opportunities in product development, new distribution systems and innovative branding.

Government activities should focus on supporting entrepreneurship not just to meet these new goals, but because it unlocks people’s minds, fosters innovation and enables people to exercise their talents. If people are shielded from the forces of competition, it is like saying they are disabled.

Entrepreneurship gives people the feeling that they are valued and have meaning, that they are as capable, as competent and as gifted as anyone else. Asking our citizens to compete is the same as asking them to go out into the world on behalf of Rwanda and play their part.

We know this is a tremendous challenge given our status as a land-locked nation emerging from conflict, with few natural resources, little specialised infrastructure and low historical investment in education. But, in fact, we have reasons to be optimistic: we have a clear strategy to export based on sustainable competitive advantages. We sell coffee now for high prices to the world’s most demanding purchasers; our tourism experience attracts the best customers in the world and market research reveals that perceptions of Rwandan tea are improving.

This has resulted in wages in key sectors rising at more than 20 per cent on an annual basis. We have cut our aid as a percentage of total GDP by half over the past decade, and last year we grew at more than 11 per cent even as the world entered a recession.

While this is encouraging, we know the road to prosperity is a long one. We will travel it with the help of a new school of development thinkers and entrepreneurs, with those who demonstrate they have not just a heart, but also a mind for the poor.

The writer is president of Rwanda"

importance of science, technology and education investment as part of Rwanda’s ambitious development strategy

TO BE NOTED: From The Bottom Billion Blog:

"Leapfrogging technology and Rwanda’s knowledgebase

April 14, 2009 By : Jim Cust

An interesting lecture from Rwandan President Paul Kagame speaking at MIT. In the talk he addresses the importance of science, technology and education investment as part of Rwanda’s ambitious development strategy. Rwanda’s sees technology and the knowledgebase of the country as critical to unlocking growth across not just in the technology sector, or in the export of ICT services, but as integral to the countries overall development path. By focusing on the country’s human capital and its access to technology, the spillovers can benefit all aspects of the economy- from innovative energy technology to deliver electricity to rural areas, to technology-enhanced healthcare delivery models. Kagame also sees technology such as mobile phones as the key to more efficient business operation, such as distributed agricultural pricing systems.

The Rwandan President in the lecture emphasises the leapfrogging power of mobile phone technology, seen not just in Rwanda but across the developing world- however the question remains how widely can the success of mobiles be emulated for other technologies? I remain skeptical that the successes in mobile technology access in low-income countries can be translated into similar successful technological ‘leapfrogging’ in, for example explosive growth in rural computer access, simply by trusting the technology and the market. This is especially true for a replication of the private-sector-driven mobile phone sector, which is perhaps unique in its light-touch network potential. Instead, pushing the real technological boundaries will empahsise the need for more traditional forms of government infrastructure investment alongside innovative private sector action and partnerships.

It is still too early to judge, but I am enthusiastic about the present Rwandan government investment strategy to initiate the necessary infrastructure and taking this technological momentum to unlock the private sector possibilities- building of a national fibre network, roll out of national WiMAX access, a Kigali technology park and business incubator and external fibre landing stations to connect Rwanda to the coming east African undersea fibre. The strategies success or failure will hinge crucially on handover of the impetus to private sector actors. Indeed now it is up to private enterprise, foreign investment and the countries talent to sustain this momentum and fulfil Vision 2020’s ambition of Rwanda as a regional technology and telecommunications hub.

From the MIT Compton Lecture series website:

“Our continent is no longer all about violence and disease and human disasters that scarred many African countries in recent decades,” says Kagame. “We are now becoming a continent of opportunities.”

There are those who doubted Rwanda could “constitute a viable state,” says Kagame, but 14 years after bloody genocide and civil war, his country has managed an astonishing revival — enough “stability and resilience to allow the economy to grow at an average 7% annually in the past several years.” Other African nations have been expanding at the same pace; oil producers are zooming along at even faster clips. Kagame attributes this recovery to such factors as the “leapfrogging power of mobile technology,” where hundreds of millions of new cell phone users, even in remote areas without electricity, drive the growth of new business. And the number of internet subscribers in Africa is growing more than three times as fast as the rest of the world, says Kagame.

Cell phones and the internet allow Rwandan and other micro entrepreneurs to develop business networks. Kagame describes how technology helped a Kigali bakery expand beyond its neighborhood to reach more customers and suppliers, enabling workers to move into larger homes. In Kenya, Kagame recounts, a new agricultural commodity exchange “has reduced barriers between farmers, traders and consumers,” with the internet and cell phone text messages providing timely market information. This network has improved the incomes of farm families by 25%, leading to better healthcare and education. Rwanda’s power utility is also reaping the benefits of technology, keeping track of customers and accounts more efficiently, and no longer relying on government handouts.

But while technology has enabled Africans “to leapfrog some features of underdevelopment,” Kagame says it is not enough. “Our vision of becoming a middle income country by 2020 … requires thinking and acting inventively, boldly and creatively.” Kagame wants to build a foundation not just in technology but in science. Doing this requires a heavy investment in all levels of education. “Without a knowledge base,” he says, “Africa’s imperative for agricultural and industrial development to create wealth will remain unrealized.” He calls for members of the MIT community to join “in overcoming our challenges and turning them into rewarding opportunities.”

(Hat tip: Africa Unchained)"

Worries about Rwanda’s record on human and political rights are now compounded by worries about its economic record.

TO BE NOTED: From the Economist:

"The genocide in Rwanda

The difficulty of trying to stop it happening ever again

Apr 8th 2009 | KIGALI
From The Economist print edition

Fifteen years on, the country is praised for salving the wounds of genocide. Yet that comes at the price of diminishing freedom. And now the economy is faltering

AP

EVEN today, it is almost impossible to imagine how so many Rwandans could have turned into coldblooded butchers. The memorials to the slain that now grace many of the towns and villages in the country provide only small glimpses into the collective insanity that gripped a whole country in April 1994, when the Hutu killers turned on their Tutsi fellow citizens and Hutu sympathisers, leaving over 800,000 dead in three months.

Take the memorial at the National University of Rwanda in Butare, a couple of hours’ drive south-west of the capital, Kigali. Under a corrugated iron roof a long board displays the photographs of about 60 students who were killed. In fact, most of the staff and students at the university, over 500 in all, were slaughtered in just two weeks or so; only a few escaped across the nearby borders to Congo or Burundi. Many of the students were killed by their own teachers, specifically the dean of agriculture and vice-dean of political science. The former not only personally killed students but organised the campus massacre as well. What could have been running through their minds in the weeks leading up to the killings, as these highly educated people calculated how best they could hack or shoot their own students to death?

These awful questions haunt Rwanda to this day. It is only a mixed comfort to the genocide’s few survivors at the university that those two former academics responsible for many of their friends’ deaths are still in prison, just down the road. Some think they should have had a worse fate. But one of Rwanda’s main problems, in terms of justice and retribution, has been that so many Hutus, hundreds of thousands of them, became génocidaires; it was always going to be impossible to impose the harshest sentences on all of them. Only the ringleaders have been tried by an international court sitting in neighbouring Tanzania. Thousands of others in Rwanda have been sentenced to prison by local traditional courts known as gacaga. Gangs of them can be seen in their distinctive overalls, doing hard labour, digging irrigation ditches and so on, all over Rwanda.

They are a constant visual reminder of the crimes of 15 years ago. Indeed, in some ways Rwanda is facing as difficult a struggle today with the legacy of the genocide as at any time since 1994. For it is only now that thousands of former génocidaires who have been fighting for many years from bases in the jungles of eastern Congo against the current Tutsi-dominated government are at last returning to Rwanda.

That they are returning at all is a victory for the long-term strategy of President Paul Kagame’s government to bring back the country’s previously hostile Hutus from the near abroad. Most of them were put to flight by Mr Kagame’s own then-rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), that forced an end to the genocide in 1994. They are being re-educated in special camps in the hope that they can be peacefully reintegrated into Rwandan society.

But even if the policy works, it will come at a high price for the Tutsi survivors of the genocide. Freddy Mutanguha, who manages the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, is used to dealing with the genocide’s consequences. Yet even he found it “too difficult” when two of the returning génocidaires moved into his home village of Kibuye a couple of months ago after they came back from Congo. So now his neighbours are two known killers “being fed and protected by the Rwandan government”. Mr Mutanguha, understandably, did not want to return to his own home to see them.

Courage and even generosity of spirit in dealing with an awful situation has earned Mr Kagame’s government high marks in the West and in Africa as a whole. After all, Rwanda is the only genocide case where the victims, the Tutsi, have chosen to reintegrate their killers into the country and to live as neighbours again—a uniquely hard task, especially in Africa’s most densely populated country. In other genocide cases, the victims have left altogether, sometimes to help found a new state of their own, such as Israel, or have been marginalised in their own country, as were the Herero in South-West Africa, now Namibia. To encourage reconciliation, Rwanda has embarked on an experiment to change completely the way a new generation thinks about itself. Now, officially, no one is a Hutu or Tutsi; there are only Rwandans. Ethnicity, the genocide’s alleged cause, is being outlawed.

The use and abuse of anti-genocide law

For sure, the government’s policy has contributed to a new era of peace; Rwanda, it is generally agreed, is now one of Africa’s most law-abiding countries. Yet the reach and ferocity of new laws encouraging reconciliation are making Western donors and many Rwandans queasy. Is the country paying too high a price for its policy?

Critics fear that any challenge to an already authoritarian government is gradually being outlawed under a pretext of criminalising the promotion of so-called “genocide ideology”. There were already stiff penalties for “divisionism”, an acknowledgment of differences between Hutu and Tutsi. But last year a new and even fiercer law was passed, carrying heavy penalties. Its criminalisation of genocide ideology is so broadly drawn that it could be used to prosecute people for any number of utterances.

Clause three, for instance, states that the crime of promoting genocide ideology is characterised by “dehumanising a person or group with the same characteristics”, and that this can be done by “marginalising, laughing at one’s misfortune, defaming, mocking, boasting, despising, degrading, creating confusion aimed at negating the genocide which occurred, stirring up ill feelings”.

About 1,300 cases involving genocide ideology were initiated in Rwanda’s courts in the 2007-08 judicial year, even before the latest law was passed. Human-rights critics say these ill-defined laws are being abused by the government, enabling it to prosecute anyone, including young children, who say anything the government dislikes or who draw attention to the role of Mr Kagame’s own RPF in the massacres of 1994. For many, justice has been too partial in post-genocide Rwanda; many of Mr Kagame’s men, estimated by the UN to have killed up to 45,000 people between April and August 1994, have got off lightly.

These draconian laws chime with the government’s general dislike of dissent. Some foreign critics are now banned from entering the country, however sympathetic they may have been to Rwanda in the past. Alison des Forges was probably the greatest foreign expert on Rwanda until her death in a plane crash in February. She had been the most sensitive and thorough chronicler of the genocide but, as an increasingly vocal critic of Mr Kagame’s human-rights record, she was banned last year, her death barely marked in Kigali. Open political opposition is declining. At elections the formal opposition parties largely mimic the government line and then join the government afterwards. There is little real choice.

Worries about Rwanda’s record on human and political rights are now compounded by worries about its economic record. Indeed, they are related. The economic recovery after the genocide, when Hutu militias looted the country before fleeing into Congo, had been remarkable, if largely funded by the diaspora and by foreign aid. But in the past few years it has stalled. The number of Rwandans living in extreme poverty is reckoned to have declined from over 75% in 1994 to 57% in 2006. But the figure has barely moved since then. Because of a rapid increase in population, the absolute number of people in poverty has probably risen.

Rwanda now needs a vigorous private sector to keep the economy moving in the right direction, especially if the country is to meet its lofty goal of becoming east Africa’s service hub. The government talks up its eagerness for free enterprise, endearing it to the West, but entrepreneurs, especially from abroad, often feel hamstrung in what they are allowed to do—and so leave. A controlling government will hurt Rwanda’s economic prospects as well as its wider freedoms; the two are indivisible."