Cherlin

Rwanda getting out ahead

Rwandan President Paul Kagame at the African ICT conference in Accra said that all of the country's secondary schools were to be connected to the internet by 2017. Rwanda has an aggressive Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) policy, aiming at making the poor country a technology centre within the next decades.

President Kagame of Rwanda is the only African state leader to attend to the Africa Regional Conference of the World Summit on the
Information Society (WSIS), except the Ghanaian host, President John Agyekum Kufuor. In an interview with David Kezio-Musoke of Highway Africa News Agency (HANA), President Kagame reveals Rwanda's ICT strategies.

Asked on how Rwanda had achieved to become "a role model of a country with an effective ICT policy at national level," President Kagame said that his government had made that choice "in terms of overall objectives." The UN's Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) had helped Rwanda with necessary resources, including the human resource. "It is on that basis that everyone has started using us a model," the Rwandan President said.

- Today we have put in place broadband infrastructure, Mr Kagame explained. "It is possible to have wireless internet access. We have
the fibre optic infrastructure in the city and most of the towns and the provinces. We are working to expand it to other areas of the
countries."

(Rwanda has its own version of Linux localized into its own language, Kinyarwanda, as I reported here last year.)