skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Nathan Loyd is an entrepreneur and a Kenyan-American who came to visit Rwanda 10 years ago and hasn't left. He married a Rwandan woman, has two children, and has built the leading real estate development company in Rwanda.
Nathan started with a single desk, a computer and a single truck. DN International now has 400 employees and is successfully competing with Belgian and Kenyan developers. He spent an hour with us in his office talking about the housing challenges in Kigali, explaining how he has grown his business so successfully, and discussing where he sees the opportunities in the future. The land ownership is in the process of moving from an old 99-year lease structure to a full land title law. At the same time, three banks are beginning to develop mortgage products.
He just finished a 28-house development called Hillview that completely sold out before the project was complete. These are tidy three and four bedroom, three-bath homes in a secure community. Their own sewage treatment plant produces "gray" water that is used for lawn irrigation. Last month, the president of Rwanda visited to tour the development and named it the best new development in the country.
Across the valley from Hillview, Nathan's company has just broken ground on a new development called Greenpark Villas, a 70-house community that will include a swimming pool, clubhouse, bank, and a convenience store.
Collin Sekajugo is a very exciting artist in Kigali, and he believes passionately about the role of creativity in building a nation. His workshop and gallery where he and a small cohort of artists work and display their art is on the side of one of Kigali's hills. He named it Ivuka Arts Studio, meaning "rebirth."
The artists paint on the back porch in a cool breeze overlooking the city, and display their art in the gallery.
These young people come to Ivuka with raw talent, and Collin works with them to improve their technique and help them find their visual voice.
They work in all mediums, including oil, acrylics, water color, sculpture, and jewelry.The jewelry is actually made up of very fine strips of magazines rolled tightly and them dipped in clear glue. The colors are bright, making the necklaces eye-catching.
Collin recently had a show at a local club. This large piece, entitled Legends of Legends, is about music and musicians and captures the struggle and hope of music to understand pain and rebirth.
It's about Ivuka. It's an unusual piece. I'm afraid I couldn't leave it in Rwanda.
After a full day of meetings with government officials
and site visits of entrepreneurs here in Rwanda, what better way to end the day than with a dance performance.
Collin Sekajugo is a fine artist and founder and director of Ivuka Arts Center, a cooperative of 15 artists in Kigali. He also founded the RwaMakondera (Rwandan Horns) Children’s Dance Troupe, an amazing group of young children that Collin found begging on the streets. He taught them traditional Rwandan dances and brought them into an artistic community where they could find a sense of belonging and a place to develop their own self-expression.
These young children ages 3-12 crowded into their small outdoor rehearsal space and performed for us non-stop for an hour. It was a joyful time, and many other kids from the neighborhood crowded around us. Before long I had many three and four year olds on my lap, hanging on to my arms, and learning what all the buttons on my Nikon D90 do.
I shot no less than 170 images.
Yesterday at the Making Vision a Reality entrepreneur workshop here in Kigali, an administrator from the Rwandan Tourism Institute came up to me and requested that I come and speak to his school the next morning. It seemed like a reasonable request, and we slipped it into our schedule.
This morning, Chris Hills and I arrived at the school to learn that they had called a mandatory assembly, and all 200-300 students were crowded into two different halls. I spoke about entrepreneurialism and Chris talked about adventure tourism (his undergrad degree). I was amazed at the intensity of the student's attention and the depth of their questions. Every question had to do with how to start a business.
Like many countries around the world, Rwanda realizes that it has a poor record for customer service. But from the passion and clarity with which these students articulated their dreams, it is clear that they will be a positive force for the Rwanda tourist experience.
I bumped into the US Ambassador to Rwanda, Stuart Symington, and his wife on the flight from Brussels to Kigali last Saturday and got reacquainted. Knowing that we were hosting seven Americans in Rwanda, he invited us all to his residency for cocktails. He also asked us to invite several of our Rwandan entrepreneurs to join us.
We all sat on his garden terrace overlooking the downtown hills and talked about our experiences in Rwanda. He was very curious about our US entrepreneurs, and even more interested in the stories of our Rwandan counterparts. It was a rich discussion about the challenges and opportunities and hope that is present today in this unique country.
A topic that one of members was struggling with was the balance between justice and reconciliation. Is justice served by reconciliation? Stuart Symington's reply was clear: the future in more important than the past. This doesn't mean that the tragic events of 1994 should ever be forgotten or minimized. One of the slogans in Rwanda is "never again." But Rwandans have also made clear that they don't want to be defined by the past.
The future of the country and its people is more important than the past.
Today was the first of a series of quarterly workshops we are producing for entrepreneurs in Rwanda. The workshop is called Making Vision A Reality, and it's focused on using the experiences of American entrepreneurs and a set of specialized entrepreneurial tools to help Rwandan business owners build their business, leadership, and technical skills.
We struck a very generous agreement with The Strategic Coach and its owners, Dan Sullivan and Babs Smith to use several of their most important strategic planning tools in our workshop. It was amazing to watch these Rwandan entrepreneurs experience the same personal and professional breakthroughs that their counterparts in the Strategic Coach Program experience in the US.
The seven American entrepreneurs that we brought to the country were scattered among the 25 Rwandan entrepreneurs in attendance. By the end of the afternoon, the entire room was electric, and you could tell by the stories and the faces that this group of entrepreneurs had succeeded not only in putting together a detailed three year strategic plan, but they had achieved a new level of confidence in their ability to reach their goals.
Out of this incredible bonding experience, the Rwandan entrepreneurs will be organized into small groups of seven that will meet monthly to hold each other accountable. The level of intimacy and willingness to be accountable to one another that was achieved today was wonderful to behold.
I had a engaging discussion and plant tour with the CEO of Utexrwa, a textile manufacturer in Kigali. Their core business is processing cotton from the raw material all the way to finished clothing products. But the fascinating aspect of their business is their emerging silk program.
And if that wasn’t enough, they are now beginning to innovate with banana fiber, a highly absorbent material. Utexrwa engineers built two custom machines to turn the core of a banana tree trunk into fiber and then they blend that with cotton to make a highly absorbent cloth.
