The Head of State was speaking Monday at the opening of Transform Africa Economic Forum in advance of the Transform Africa Summit.
He said that technological integration should be seen as the vanguard of economic integration more generally.
Kagame said that the purpose of integrating technology, it is to serve all people and their businesses among other things.
“I’m sure in this audience there are people who have had close to a dozen stopovers, half of them maybe on our continent. Sometimes to fly home here you have to go to Europe maybe from one city to another in Europe, then to another city in Africa. So, when people are talking about one common digital market or one common air transport market, I think the purpose is to solve some of these problems,” he said.
He said that when people are integrating technologies, they should bear in mind to also integrate regions, countries as well as the whole continent.
“I’m sure people here know it very well, better than I how even when we are communicating the traffic follows the same route as the planes I was talking about. Doesn’t it? Sometimes the traffic has to go through outside Africa and then back to us. What are you integrating, if you don’t include this? Why don’t we have that happening without having to pay for a visa for the traffic to first go out of Africa and then receive it back?” Kagame challenged Africans.
“The visa is in the form of how much you pay. Is this something we can’t address? We are supposedly very proud Africans, businesses and governments, I think we need to work hard on this,” he noted.
Kagame said that Africa still has a long way to go noting that in recent years, regional cooperation on technology has produced good results to some extent.
Kagame said that other urgent integration projects have languished on the African agenda, and added that through technology Africans can find ways of speeding them up.
“It is beginning to change and with such a forum bringing so many people with diverse backgrounds together, I think we can make it happen faster. So, we see technology cooperation as part of that story. But behind it there has to be political will in real terms,” he said.
He said that Smart Africa’s focus on One Africa Network has helped lay the groundwork for ambitious projects such as the African Continental Free Trade Area.
Kagame pledged that they will continue to advance the digital transformation agenda championed by the African Union, Smart Africa, the Broadband Commission as well as the external partners.
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