A Country on the Move

This morning, I took our team of US social entrepreneurs over to the US Embassy here in Kigali for a briefing from USAID. It was eye-opener for most of the team. Despite the perceptions of lackluster progress in much of Africa, Rwanda enjoyed a 11.3% GDP growth rate in 2008! The rate of HIV/AIDS is down from an estimated 10% to 3.1%, and 70% of those with the disease have access to ARVs (the highest rate in Africa).

It is clearly a country on the move. As one USAID official commented, a national initiative that would normally take a year to complete in any other country is given a 3-month time table by President Paul Kagame. He is in a hurry to bring Rwanda into the middle-income ranking of per capita income. He looks at the Asian "Tigers" of Singapore, Tiawan, and South Korea and wants Rwanda to become the first African "Gorilla."

And as he said in South Africa over the weekend, he doesn't want to do it with outside aid; he wants Africans to do it themselves.