Rwanda and the Infrastructure of the Future

by Nathaniel Whittemore

categories: africa, Emerging Markets

Published June 24, 2009 @ 10:07AM PT

(A One Laptop Per Child workshop in Kigali, Rwanda)

The thing that I love most about the post-genocide Rwandan development experiment is its aspiration. President Paul Kagame's approach to rebuilding his country might be summed up as "be damned with the scraps from the global economic table, we deserve and will build a 21st century economy." Fundamentally, the approach seems to me to be about vision and infrastructure; a vision of a prosperous, thriving, unique African country and the infrastructure - from hospitals to broadband cable - to make it a reality.

As I've written before, Kagame's strong hand is cause for concern for many. In "Rwanda Rising," one of the best articles written about Rwanda's particular approach to economic growth, Jeff Chu wrote about the President's disinclination toward other people's ideas of how his country should be run.

"No country can depend on development aid forever," Kagame told Fast Company. "Such dependency dehumanizes us and robs us of our dignity." It may also, of course, make him accountable to people outside Rwanda. Last December, following a United Nations report that Rwanda was supporting Tutsi rebels in Congo, the Netherlands and Sweden suspended $20 million in aid. Kagame slammed what he called the donors' "arrogance" -- then arrested the rebel leader and made a deal with the Congolese president.

But that was not the main point of the article. Indeed, the article focused more on how Kagame leverages strategic connections to build the economic relationships that can help the country thrive. During a trip to the US, Kagame parlayed a meeting with Costco CEO Jim Senegal into a promise to visit the country, which has since led to Costo becoming one of the two biggest buyers of Rwandan coffee - purchasing about 25% of the country's premium crop.

Recently, I've been incredible excited to see entrepreneurship and technology reporter Sarah Lacy's dispatches from Rwanda, one of the countries featured in a new book she's working on. Today, she wrote about how Rwanda is overcoming the digital divide by investing in technology infrastructure and training for young leaders.

According to Lacy, it's all about infrastructure: first making sure that mobile phones - the lifeblood of the economy - work everywhere; next, laying out the cable that will help carry broadband internet to every district in the country; finally, investing in human capital to transform these ingredients into entrepreneurial opportunities.

Rwanda sends 300 students at a time to India Institute of Technology to develop skills in hardware, software and telecom they can bring back to their home country. When one kid graduates, another one gets to go. Why IIT? It’s cheaper than Western schools, just as good at training engineers, and has a better understanding of the challenges and needs of emerging markets, Bakuramutsa says. In addition, Rwanda hopes their kids will pick up some of the Indians’ entrepreneurial spirit. (Pay attention here, US: We’re no longer the education destination of choice for the emerging world.)

There are a few important take aways for all of us in the social entrepreneurship space:

1. The difference between "social entrepreneurship" and "entrepreneurship" can break down quickly. When we're talking about African students building new web applications to make it easier to send money to families back home, what should we designate that? Entrepreneurship or Social Entrepreneurship? Or does it not matter? Should it perhaps make us wonder if we should instead be holding up that type of work to argue that real entrepreneurship is about the creation of all types of value - not just about financial wealth. In other words, maybe our view should be about the inseparability of "social" from "entrepreneurship," and perhaps that's easier to understand in the emerging market context.

2. Entrepreneurship needs infrastructure to thrive. A lesson from Rwanda should be that we have to give entrepreneurship the ingredients it needs to thrive - technological and physical infrastructure, training and education, effective regulatory environments with appropriate protections for intellectual property, and more. The more we locate the entrepreneur him or herself as the unit of change, the easier it is to forget that for entrepreneurship to benefit society, it needs to be within an ecosystem optimized for the impact of that entrepreneurship to disperse and scale.