Rwanda: Smart Rwanda to Boost ICT for Development

The ministry of youth and ICT (MYICT) in collaboration with the Work Bank is hosting the SMART Rwanda Days which started on Monday.

The event is part of a co-creation exercise involving global experts and Rwandans running on social media and aimed at identifying possible "Smart" solutions (meaning innovative, information-driven, ICT-enabled). It is a high-level meeting which is designed to help stakeholders develop a shared vision for Smart Rwanda.

SMART Rwanda will be a citizen-centric and business-friendly, accessible and sustainable information and service delivery ecosystem, realized through public and private investment, to transform the economy and enhance the well-being of individuals and the community.



It will harness the transformative powers of ICTs and their cross-cutting nature to help increase the productivity of other sectors, achieve the targeted 11.5% average GDP and economic transformation hence the ten SMART Rwanda areas i.e. SMART Education, SMART Healthcare, SMART Governance, SMART Business, SMART Agriculture, SMART Environment, SMART Job Creation, SMART Infrastructure, SMART Girls and SMART Cities.

Smart Rwanda will also contribute to rural development and reduction of poverty to less than 30% through deployment of SMART Villages throughout the country.

Through SMART Rwanda, the ICT sector reaffirms its role as a leader in innovations. The sector aims to do things Smarter, which is to do more with less. To ensure sustainability of development initiatives for example, the sector will deploy public-private partnership (PPP) models, and green technologies.

"Key to the success of SMART Rwanda is the sustainability of all our interventions. Our strategy will be to rely on the much needed private sector resources and capabilities," said Jean Philbert Nsengimana, the Minister of Youth and ICT.

He added that SMART Rwanda should be mainly driven by the private sector. "The government will intervene in only those indispensable public interest projects where it does not make business sense for private sector actors to invest or to invest in early-stage ventures, so as to showcase opportunity and stimulate future private sector investment," Nsengimana stressed.

During the Smart Rwanda Days, essential components of Smart Rwanda Vision will be identified. The overall problem statements, more granular micro-level problem statements, and possible solutions to these problems using "Smart enablers" will be developed.

This event will be streamed live and can be followed through #SmartRwanda.