{{President Paul Kagame has noted that Rwanda’s progress has been catapaulted by a rigorous investiment in human resource and increasing institutions capacity all aimed at putting in place good governance that build investor confidence.
In his presentation at the Milken Institute event in US, President Kagame responded to incquiries on the things that he thought need to do in Rwanda to take the country to the next level. }}
{Below is a short presentation by President Paul Kagame at the Milken Event.}
{{Thank you.}}
Let me give a background of where we have come from.
Where we have come from in Rwanda if you look at where we were 20yrs ago immidately after the tragic genocide, we had the whole world trying to help bringing humanitarian assistance. This was definately costing money.
Had Rwandans sat back and felt confortable with recieving that kind of help we probably could have remained in the same situation even today.
In few years after 1994, we started interucting with the donors. We told them maybe we needed to organise ourselves and do things differently.
As we helped to deal with emergency situation we needed to think about another step and that was building something so that we dont stay in the emergency situation.
The relationship with Hon. Tony Blair we had was around mid 90s when he came to power.
His government which was not a traditional donor to Rwanda was leading the donor community in terms of giving support to Rwanda. And they opened up the way because when we insisted on working together ,we insisted we must lead the way and we benefit from the resources differently but many donors resisted the idea but we insisted on working as real partners.
We invited many NGOs and told them so much was Flowing through the country and with very little impact. And we said Lets coordinate our activities on the ground and allow the building of the foundations onto which the country can build its future. Thats how we tookoff and UK led the way in the donor community and thats how Rwanda started taking off and moving forward.
Right from the begining we understood that to do things diffrently and for different things to happen other than what we have been used to including poverty and others. The situation in Rwanda though to the extreme side, it mirrored what happens in the rest of Africa.
As we were dealing with our own situation we were saying and believed in good governance and thus we needed to make reforms, Political, Economic,Investing in human resource (Education) infrastructure but the issue was where would money come from?
We were recieving money but it was not very helpful and we said we could use such money that was coming in such a disorganised way to start flowing to do the very things we needed to do for a better future and this is where the struggle was. Thats how we continued to move on to where we are today.
You can have the reforms going on and the money flowing to build infrastructure but there are key things to note. There is need for capacity to be built both human and institutional capacity. We concentrated on this.
I would have wished that Blair stayed in office much longer. After his tenure we met he had been thinking about what to do after office and I was thinking about what to do while in office and that was about building capacity and insitutions and thats how AGI came to be associated with Rwanda and has done tremendous work in Rwanda and has allowed us to bring in other partners.
Capacity is what we concentrated on. We invested in people and institutions. We brought in people to work with our own to help develop them and thats what has allowed us to take off and once the setting is ripe as it is , it has allowed people to invest in the country as well as we have been working on regional intergration because Rwanda is small and just developing itself it makes more sense if rwanda is playing in a wider market of the region.
Investors who come to Rwanda we give them the thinking that they should not just be thinking about investing in Rwanda but to be seen as through Rwanda to the wider regional market.
{{Importance of Larger Markets}}
We have been encouraging intergration to take place in the region . more countries are expected to join the larger East african Community bloc.
As we have been intergratins we have created a customs union, common market, and the future political federation, however, go step by step.
The intergration maytake long, but you find a few responding faster and those responding at same pace could move together as others deal with some of the problems they think they have.
We have been looking at railway, energy projects and oil pipeline infrastrustructure in East Africa we moved on with Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda because we had the urgency to move but left space for others to come in and mantaining the integrity of the Intergration.
Captial will flow across a wider space in the region and not confined to one country and creating sense for (member states)s and the investors. This will bring transformation.
Africa is nolonger just dealing with poverty issues but pushing for prosperty and wealth creation.
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