Rwanda: A Frog Leap Ahead

A service and IT society has evolved from an agrarian society with industrial production. That is how economists see the natural development steps of a national economy, which Rwanda must take into account, but numerous attempts at industrialization have failed in Africa so far. Is digitalization the key?

Rwanda sets out to prove otherwise as a proof-of-concept country.  Start-up clusters for digital business models, drone transport, and mobile phone production are testing in the country as a sand box in an African context. Advances in solar and computer technologies from cheap Asian production also allow Africans from low levels to try their hand at them and eventually become more productive and prominent, mastering these technologies one day. As with the mobile phone, their decentralized nature is central.

Combined with the pattern of African urbanization in cities of less than three hundred thousand inhabitants, this creates excellent opportunities to compete for good governance. Read more in Africa’s century – Is the grip on prosperity succeeding?