Rwanda: Mobile and Digital Strategies on Display

Ten bags!  That is what we carried back from Rwanda, a small mountainous country in east equatorial Africa last night.  Why? The short answer is we have friends in Boise, Idaho with family and friends in Rwanda.  We took 7 bags to Rwanda, but unexpectedly returned with 10. Our refugee friends that have been resettled in the USA miss many familiar things from the region of their birth.  Now that they have jobs and money in the USA, they put in orders with their family and friends for the things they miss most.  We were surprised when we delivered a suitcase full of clothes to family members in a refugee camp high in the mountains of Northern Rwanda, and they gave us three in return.  We experienced that more than once. So much for traveling light!

While in Kigali, Rwanda I had the honor of speaking to a number of government ministries and most of the large banks about digital strategies.  Not so much digital transformation though.  How do you talk about digital transformation when digital is so new to Rwanda?  That is the question Professor Michel Bezy challenged me with, when I was the guest lecturer at the Master of Computer Science program at Carnegie Mellon University Rwanda.  Professor Bezy continued, here in Rwanda we are implementing digital for the first time.  We have no legacy IT systems to hinder our progress.  Wow!  I think many IT departments in western industrialized countries right now would envy that situation.  Most of the biggest problems in the west now are digitally transforming legacy systems.  It’s like running a race while dragging an anchor.  It is their biggest obstacles to future success among many we work with.

Put yourself in a Rwandan’s shoes.  How would you design and develop an IT environment differently if you started from a blank sheet, a white canvas like they are doing? It is a fun thought exercise.

For a small landlocked country like Rwanda, digital changes everything.  The disadvantages of moving physical products in a landlocked country disappear with digital products and services.   The recent completion of 5,000 kilometers of fiber optics cable now makes mobile and Internet services available across much of Rwanda.  Now to get electricity!  Electricity is not yet available to 74 percent of the households, but that number is also improving fast.  I am fascinated by the fact that more households have mobile phones (approximately 70%) than electricity (less than 30%).  In fact, households with Internet nearly equal households with electricity.  I watched as school children lined up at a school office to retrieve their parent’s mobile phones after school.  They were all being charged in the school office because they had no electricity at home.

While traveling back and forth across beautiful Rwanda visiting schools, refugee camps and kids that we sponsor through Africa New Life, http://www.africanewlife.org/, I was keenly watching and pondering the challenges of living in a developing country where over 80% of the population are rural farmers.  I observed the work.  I spoke to farmers.  It is a MASSIVE amount of work to feed a family.  Basic tasks like getting water for your family to cook and clean often require herculean efforts in a country of a thousand hills that has made vertical farming an art form.  

It occurred to me while watching how much work living can be, that digital transformation and productivity improvements can significantly impact individuals as well as industry.  The Financial Times’ David White gives this example, “Registering a land transfer in an outlying village in Rwanda requires a number of journeys — to the nearest subdistrict office to get forms to fill in, which then have to be notarised, to a bank to pay the notary’s fees, then back to the government office, probably returning later to check the status of the process.  Now registration can be done online. For people with no internet-capable device of their own, this could be done at a government centre, or a cyber café, or the place perhaps where they already buy phone airtime and do their mobile banking.” Rwanda’s Vision of an ICT-Enabled Economy,http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fc318106-deda-11e4-b9ec-00144feab7de.html#axzz4K8LMqocP.

Rwanda 2016

Just feeding a family takes all day.  Getting water can take a half a day.  Walking to town can take half a day.  Walking to and from school can take half a day.  It is life draining work to survive in the mountains far from town and markets.  This point was burned into my consciousness over and over on this trip.

While speaking at a gathering of banks and financial services companies at the beautiful Serena Hotel in Kigali, a senior official of the Rwandan Tax Authority demonstrated to me how SMEs (small to medium size enterprises) can now register and pay their quarterly taxes all on basic mobile phones.  It was very impressive.  We don’t even have that capability in the USA!  It can save hardworking entrepreneursthe need for endless travel.

Another innovation that I read about, but did not yet see at work, is the simple idea of the Hippo Roller, https://www.hipporoller.org/.  Using a simple design and elementary physics to roll water instead of carrying it (often on your head) saves so much energy and pain – https://youtu.be/YUsKjleOopk.  Everyday I saw men, women and children excerting great effort carrying heavy loads of water miles to their homes.  Making this easier and faster could free up calories and time for more economically productive activities.  I hope these are widely and quickly adopted universally.

Rwanda is looking at all solutions.  They are pushing for farmers to seek economy of scales in agriculture.  They are organizing small subsistence farmers into cooperatives so they can share the work and costs of farm equipment to improve their overall productivity and incomes.

With a population of 12 million,  Rwanda is the mostly densely packed country in Africa, but in the past 5 years they have lifted over 1 million of their people out of poverty.  They are one of the fastest developing nations in the world, and all of this is happening just 22 years after their peoples, economy and nation was devastated by genocide where 1 million of their people were murdered in a 90-day period.  Ideas, both good and bad can have a big impact on a small country and economy like Rwanda.

Forbes: The Surprising Story Behind The Worlds Fastest Developing Countries, by Robin Meyerhoff, Senior Director, Corporate Affairs, SAP, http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2016/06/27/the-surprising-story-behind-the-worlds-fastest-developing-country/#238628b372d6