Ericsson and The Rwanda Ministry of Youth and ICT have come together in an initiative called 'Smart Rwanda' that is geared towards connecting, innovating and transforming Rwanda into a knowledge economy to drive Rwanda's global competitiveness and job creation.
The initiative aims to allow Rwanda to become a highly competitive, agile, open and innovative smart economy with the most favourable business climate, which attracts large-scale investments and rewards entrepreneurship, therefore enabling fast growth and exports, leveraging ICT innovations and transforming the nation into a smart society.
This landmark development takes place in the lead-up to the GSMA’s annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a key gathering for African stakeholders with over 46 African governments attending last year.
The ICDL programme enables the proficient use of ICT to empower individuals, organisations and society, through the development, promotion and delivery of quality certification programmes.
On the first day of his visit, he toured various government and non-government institutions working in areas of technology capacity building, innovation and projects dealing with ICT development especially the 4G Innovation Center at Carnegie Mellon University – Rwanda and toured the Rwanda’s first innovation hub known as KLab.
Read more: ITU Secretary General commends Rwanda’s ICT advancement
In terms of foreign direct investments, the ICT sector has worked as a magnet, attracting 45% of the total in-flows which is more than the next 5 sectors combined, including trade, financial sector, mining and manufacturing.