From Wired

Rwanda was consistently praised last week at the Transform Africa summit by presidents, academics, business leaders and others for its progress in implementing technology initiatives, building productive partnerships with the private sector and creating an environment where innovation can flourish.

Wired.co.uk attended the summit and spoke exclusively to Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame — the man who has been at the helm of the country’s transformation over the past 13 years — about ICT education, entrepreneurship and the wider implications of the technology being built into the country’s infrastructure.

Transforming Rwanda into a knowledge economy

Small and landlocked, with no oil and few minerals, Rwanda may be blessed with beauty, but it lacks natural resources to fuel its economy. Instead, it relies heavily on agriculture, and tourism to a lesser extent, which is why part of Vision 2020 the government has been investing heavily in technology, infrastructure and the skills of Rwandan people — so that the country is able to build a competitive knowledge economy.

“For a landlocked country you want first of all to address the infrastructure problems, which is logistics, transport, communication and so on and so forth,” Kagame tells Wired.co.uk. “But you also want to get involved in high value products and in services because these are not directly affected by the position we’re in of being landlocked, or they are not as affected as much. So some of the things are just dictated by the nature of our economy, of our country.”

-Written by Katie Collins

Read more at wired.co.uk