Tech comes to Rwanda

from African Business

An article on a revolution happening in Rwanda. and how it help lift the poor. - Kale

Queen's Internet Cafe, in the impoverished Kigali suburb of Nyamirambo, is teeming with children throughout most of the day. "Most of these kids are street children," says the owner, Pacifique Bayongwa. "I feel bad about letting them in, since I know they must be paying me with money stolen from their parents. But at least they're learning something useful."

The children at Queen's come mostly for the online games. "They stay here for hours each day, and after a few weeks they become really proficient with a computer," says Bayongwa. In the evenings, Bayongwa and his assistants hold courses for adults to teach them basic programming skills. The next stage, he says, is to make sure that the children also pick up some knowledge about the power of information technology (IT). "I have no doubt that IT can change lives," he tells me.

Establishments like Queen's are proliferating throughout the Rwandan capital, and would seem to mark the beginning of a transformation for the economy. Fourteen years on from the genocide which brought in its wake grim economic prospects, the average income is $260 per year. With the country's staple food, beans, reaching the price of almost $1 per kilogram, most of the population is hard pressed just to subsist. Since the beginning of the decade, President Paul Kagame has emphasised that his vision for the country is based on the development of information technology as a poverty reduction tool. Policymakers in Rwanda believe that IT can reduce poverty in two main thrusts: by improving the circulation of technical knowledge and thus increasing the productivity of the agricultural sector, and, for the long term, by creating employment in new, globally competitive IT enterprises. Kagame is confident that by 2020, Rwanda could be transformed into a knowledge-based economy. Rwandan officials are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. "There has been great progress towards our goals, which can be seen in several key indicators," says Professor Romain Murenzi, the minister of science and technology in the President's Office, a post that was created last year to boost Rwanda's IT development.

Mobile benefits

A good place to start to assess how far along the road Rwanda is to prosperity is to try and spot the humble mobile telephone. It is good news according to Murenzi. "Mobile line usage has increased to 660,000, starting from a subscriber base of almost zero just a few years ago," he says. The number of mobile subscribers increased from zero to 250,000 between 1998 and 2006, and then doubled to 500,000 in 2007. The country's two cellular operators--MTN Rwanda, owned by MTN Group of South Africa, and the previously state-owned Rwandatel, sold to Lap Green Networks of Libya--are projecting growth to more than a million lines next year.

"This has many benefits for farmers and small traders, who are able to circulate important information," Murenzi says. He points out that farmers in remote areas are now able to check and inform each other about the price of coffee on the open market, and thus not fall prey to middlemen who have offered them inferior prices in the past. More importantly, they are able to share their technical knowledge and improve the quality of their produce. With the improved quality comes an improved price: while farmers in Rwanda sold a pound of coffee for only $0.5 in 2001, the price has now gone up to more than $3 per pound. One of the most significant IT projects in Rwanda is the deployment of a fibre-optic cable system throughout the countryside in an effort to provide high-bandwidth internet access to impoverished farmers.

This network will connect to Uganda, and at a later stage to Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi. The system is set to kick in around 2009, upon the completion of one of the two submarine fibre optic cable projects--known as the East African Marine System (TEAMS) and The Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy)--that will land in Mombasa and give East Africa direct access to the worldwide cable network.

The cable, once complete, will greatly reduce internet costs in the region--particularly in rural areas-where currently there is exclusive reliance on expensive satellite communications to get a speedy connection

With the new cable in place, data costs--the price of transferring one megabit per second per month for Internet Service Providers--will begin to drop from the current regional average of $7,000 per megabit, to less than $500. For comparison, in the UK the price per megabit per second is normally around $4. Kenya, with the most developed infrastructure in the region, will see the immediate benefit from the price drop. Business leaders see a future in which the country will be the regional hub for assembling IT products, as well as provide data processing services for major international companies. However, the Kenyan government's policy towards IT, unlike that of Rwanda, remains ambiguous. For instance, while computers are now exported to Kenya duty-free, computer parts are still taxable, thereby placing an obstacle to the development of a computer-assembling industry. This is not the case in Rwanda, where all IT products are imported duty-free.

Education revolution

To enable the population to make use of these technologies, Rwanda puts great emphasis on education. Enrolment for primary and secondary schools has increased to two million pupils, from a base of 940,000 at the beginning of the decade, and 40% of secondary schools now have computer labs. Enrolment for higher education has increased tenfold since the pre-genocide level of 4,000, and is now at more than 40,000, after passing the 10,000 mark in 2000 and doubling again to 20,000 in 2002. While pre-genocide Rwanda had only one institute of higher learning-the National University of Rwanda at Butare-it now has 20 such institutions. Many, such as the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), which is the main training ground for IT-related professions, have been funded through UN and donor money. The government also encourages private sector involvement in education. Two-thirds of Rwanda's higher education institutions are in private hands, thus easing the budgetary strain on the government.

But will the drive for IT development truly change the lives of Rwandans and eat away at the poverty currently in the country? Nkubito Bakuramutsa, director of Rwanda's Information Technology Authority (RITA) who recently left a position with Hewlett Packard to return to the country of his birth, is convinced that the change will be profound. He says that once the education revolution is firmly underway all the rest will follow. "We have launched a portal that is meant to provide, in one site, all the necessary information about Rwanda for citizens, investors and tourists," he says. He also speaks glowingly about how, in the not-too-distant future, all Rwandan government departments will be online. By next year, he estimates that Rwandans will be able to get all their essential documents-birth certificates, ID cards and land records-without having to queue at a distant government office.

But the big prize is when he sees IT pulling Rwandans from poverty through employment. "Our aim is to become an attractive destination for outsourcing of software development and call-centres, on the same model India implemented several years ago. Once we have reached that stage, we believe that the IT sector can become a significant employer."