By Jeremy M. Goldberg and Andrew Mack
Jeremy M. Goldberg is the Director of Communications for AMGlobal Consulting; Andrew Mack is a former World Bank official and Principal of AMGlobal Consulting. They blog at Andy's Global View.

Rwanda?!

There it was again, the same puzzled look – a combination of concern and disbelief –when I told a colleague that I’d been working in Rwanda. After all, what do we in the outside world know about Rwanda? A small country with a history of unspeakable violence, but a place of opportunity? A leader of Africa’s march into the 21st century? Well my friends, its time to think again. For all its challenges, Rwanda is by nearly all accounts making tremendous strides, working to re-build into a modern, knowledge-based economy. In fact, a number of Rwanda-watchers these days, see the country on track to be the "Silicon Valley of the East-Central Africa." But it certainly did not have to be this way. In a region where so much has gone wrong, what went right in Rwanda?

Everything started with people, and the Government’s decision to invest in people – especially techies. After the genocide in 1994, Rwanda needed to rebuild the country's tech infrastructure, but had a shortage of trained local people to get the job done. To address the issue, in 1997 the Government opened the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). Since then KIST has graduated thousands of Rwandan tech experts and is now recognized as a leader in the development of biogas technology and renewable energy.

Investments in the nation's technical expertise was only one part of a larger blueprint that was to become the country's game plan for development, Vision 2020. President Kagame was eager to move his country from an agricultural based economy to a creative and competitive economy. But he knew that for this to happen he'd need international investors. With a new openness to investment and a series of reforms to create a business-friendly climate found in few African nations – Rwanda was described as a top regional reformer in the recent World Bank "Doing Business" survey – it didn't take long to attract telecommunications and software companies. Terracom brought wireless broadband internet to Kigali; Microsoft is bringing e-learning classrooms, and just this month, a partnership was announced with the One Laptop per Child program (the $100 laptop scheme).

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The Center for Global Development’s (CGD) event this morning, Eyes beyond the Prize: Envisioning the Next Thirty Years of Microfinance, offered diverse and fascinating perspectives on the future of microfinance. This post will be done in installments to capture the wide breadth of ideas broached at the event.

Elizabeth Littlefield - CEO, Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) – started things off by describing four powerful trends that the microfinance industry will have to face in the next thirty years:

1. Demographics. In the next decade over 2.5 billion young people in developing countries will be looking for jobs. They will be mobile, urban, and informed. This has major implications for community lending models, remittances, and development of SMEs.
2. Wireless technology. As NextBillion readers know well, wireless tech has seen enormous growth at the bottom of the pyramid. Cell phones and other technology have the potential to reduce transaction costs and reach remote clients. At the same time it should not distract us from continuing to engage with groups that have not yet been reached by wireless technology.

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