The year is 1994, and a wave of hazardous tribal hatred sweeps across Rwanda leading to one of its darkest phases marked by an orgy of killings that kills a million individuals. Three million Rwandans are sent fleeing the nation.
The economy is shrinking by 50 percent with GDP per capita plummeting to $146, while inflation rates are hovering around 68 percent and poverty rates are staggering 78 percent. A clamp down on the perpetrators of this genocide would see Paul Kagame’s rise, bringing order and discipline.
Before him is the Herculean task of picking up Rwanda’s torn life from there. Fast forward time and activities to 2019 and Rwanda is the bright jewel of worldwide proportions in Africa.
How did Rwanda accomplish this historic feat? This is the question to the reply that Namibian delegates took time to digest as Chief Executive Officer of the Rwanda Development Board at the just-ended economic growth summit, Clare Akamanzi expressed Rwanda’s development experiment
Meanwhile, the national economy of Namibia has been buffeted by consecutive quarters of sub-normal development, aggravated by a crippling drought that has left the agricultural sector reeling. An approximately 700 invited guests converged at the summit where Akamanzi shared some lessons on how Rwanda managed to develop a post-genocide model economy.
Akamanzi expressed the Rwandan vision for 2020 with the long- term development objective of constructing an economy on good governance and a competent state, human resource management and knowledge-based economy, infrastructure growth and productive market-oriented agriculture.
Rwanda’s vision, she said, was that of a private-sector-led economy that makes the nation a holder of middle- income status. Such an economy, Akamanzi clarified, integrated gender equality, environmental protection and sustainable management of natural resources as well as science and technology.
“Adopting innovative home-grown solutions has been key to Rwanda’s transformation,” she expressed.
These solutions were implemented across key sectors covering community empowerment, peace building and social cohesion, governance and public service delivery as well as the economy and business reforms. Rwanda’s transformation impacted economic growth which was the highest in Africa in 2018 at 8.6% and averaged 7% over the last decade, she said.
“Growth has been driven by private capital and labour. Industry has grown six-fold, now accounting for roughly N$1.5 billion of GDP,” she said.
The organisation she represents, the Rwanda Development Board, was entrusted with accelerating the financial transformation of the private sector through a set of key tasks: investment, export and tourism. Rwanda has concentrated on investments in agro-processing, manufacturing, knowledge-based services, tourism, infrastructure, power and water as well as construction.
The nation engages in export promotion, export market analysis, facilitation while tourism is constructed around marketing, conservation, national park supervision and national park sales and reservation.
She said her nation has powerful inter- institutional collaboration, which implies delegated employees are fully empowered to behave, government agencies that provide delegated employees to investor services while PPP negotiations are taking place.
She added that what made Rwanda a success story was that effective and agile processes also exist.This, she explained, implies that Rwanda has a powerful focus on eliminating business processes and paper work while technology is used to streamline business processes while institutions are nearly integrated.
Another key factor is what she called “excellent service delivery”.
Akamanzi said there is a “commitment to deliver investor services in rapid turn-around time e.g. six hour business registration, 24-hour investment registration, client charter”.
“Rwanda is the second fastest growing economy in Africa. (It is) the most improved nation in human development in the world,” said Akamanzi.
Another clear value proposition for Rwanda is that it has a youthful and increasing population, is the fifth safest nation to walk around the world at night, has the smallest debt ratio in the region with stable scores and as a stable currency.
“Exports increased over the past years and more recently with the made in Rwanda policy. Tourism receipts have experienced very strong growth, growing by 35.6% annually on average since 2000 to 2018. Remittances recorded a 22.1% increase between 2017 and 2018,” she said.
“Rwanda started its ‘doing business reforms journey’ in 2008,” Akamanzi said.
Between 2007 and 2010, Rwanda succeeded in setting up its company steering committee, introducing administrative and regulatory reforms and automating services.
Between 2010 and 2016, the nation enhanced its ranking from 150th to 76th record breaking jump, became the second simplest nation to do company in Africa, top 10 reformer, top 30 worldwide, and continues to prioritize the reform agenda.
According to Akamanzi, Rwanda was acknowledged in that era as the second general worldwide reformer and the most coherent reformer with the greatest amount of reforms worldwide.