At least 200 information and telecommunication policymakers, members of academia and private sector players from Commonwealth nations will, next week, meet in Kigali for an Electronic Governance forum organised by the Ministry of Youth and ICT and Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation.
The two-day conference, scheduled to open on March 24, comes at a time when Rwanda is entering the last five years of its Vision 2020, whose target is to transform the country from an agriculture-driven into a knowledge-based economy with convenient service provision through electronic governance.
Rwanda’s ambition to transform itself into the dominant tech powerhouse of East Africa came to the fore today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where government representatives signed a wide-ranging deal for an unspecified amount with communications giant Ericsson for broadband and Internet services.
The partnership is part of a new initiative, SMART Rwanda, being run from the Ministry of Youth and ICT.
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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.
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.
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.
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