Rwanda Inc is booming

Cranes dot the landscape of Rwanda's capital, Kigali, showing signs of the more than 8 percent economic growth the country has sustained for more than five years. (Jon Rosen/GlobalPost)

KIGALI, Rwanda — Young, business-savvy and geeky as Silicon Valley’s finest, Viateur Mugenzi is a one-man incarnation of the new-look Rwanda.

A telecom administrator by day, the boyish 32-year-old is a partner in three start-up companies by night, including a venture that uses open-source technology to translate software into Kinyarwanda — the principal language of Rwanda’s rural population.

“Now, people in the villages who don’t speak French or English will have access to IT,” Mugenzi said. “This is where the country is headed.”

It’s an attitude that echoes the Rwandan zeitgeist, thanks to President Paul Kagame’s shrewdly branded vision to transform this densely packed nation of 10 million from an agricultural backwater into a middle-income country by 2020.

Given the spatial constraints of a farming expansion, the strategy seeks to place Rwanda as a regional leader in sectors not linked to land — including information and communication technology, logistics, financial services and education. The commonly cited model is that of Singapore and other East Asian Tigers — peasant societies as late as the 1960s that became leaders in high-tech and joined the rich world in little more than a generation.

This may seem implausible in a nation that, according to data from the International Monetary Fund, is still unable to properly feed a third of its population. Yet since Kagame assumed the presidency in 2000, Rwanda has made considerable progress.

Today, Kigali bears little resemblance to the shattered city inherited by Kagame’s Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) at the end of the infamous 1994 genocide. Streets are cleaner than in most Western cities. Traffic laws are rigidly obeyed. Wi-Fi is available at many hotels and restaurants. Yellow cranes sprout from the hilltop city center aside budding skyscrapers — a testament to growth in real GDP that has averaged 8 percent per year over the last half decade.

Across Rwanda poverty has fallen in both urban and rural areas. Subsistence farmers have benefited from government-led initiatives to increase fertilizer usage. Coffee, in the doldrums for years after the genocide, is now a thriving cash crop thanks to a strategic shift toward production of a higher-end washed variety.

Rwanda's political stability has prompted a boom in tourism and Rwanda has banked considerably on the $500-price tag of its famed gorilla treks. All this, said Eric Kacou, managing director of OTF Group, an international strategy firm that advises the Rwandan government, has helped the country move on from what’s long been its unsavory reputation for genocide.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/africa/100408/rwanda-inc