Thoughts On Rwanda

-- Quote from a placard at Belgium's Genocide Museum in Kigali

by Gale Wiley
February 27, 2010

To understand this post, first look at a video clip showing global health professor Hans Rosling* describe perceptions and then facts about the differences between the so-called developed and developing worlds:

First Hans Rosling Lecture

Next, look at Professor Rosling's second lecture:

Second Hans Rosling Lecture

Now visit Rosling's Gapminder site and do the following:

1. Click on the "Explore the World" graphic.
2. Next, select Rwanda from the list of countries.
3. Click "Play" to see how Rwanda compares with the rest of the world on two dimensions -- life expectancy and per capita income.

Results?

In 1997, the average Rwandan could (1) expect to live to 46 and (2) earn less than $1,000 a year. -- this the toll of ignorance, disease, tribalism, colonialism, corruption, genocide and AIDs.

While each year the rest of the world lives longer and earns more, Africa lags far behind, its citizens dying much younger and living much poorer.

But if the history of the rest of the world is any predictor, Africa -- and Rwanda in particular -- is changing for the better.

Although only 6 percent of Rwanda has electricity, the government plans to provide electricity to 16 percent by 2012.

Today I see Kigali planted firmly in the future and rural Rwanda trying to pull away from the mire of the middle ages.

Kigali, Rwanda's capital, is pushing its way to modernity.

When I was a correspondent in Europe, I had a hobby of counting the number of building cranes hovering over a city skyline. The more cranes, I reasoned, the more economic development for the city.

Kigali shows lots of cranes -- new government buildings, a major hotel/conference center, business buildings.

A major project to make use of an estimated $20 billion in natural gas beneath Lake Kivu is underway.

Our little project is one of hundreds in Rwanda, but the cumulative effect is significant.

Over the next decade I hope to see Rwanda move up on Hans Rosling's charts, affording Rwanda's citizens better health, longer lives, and more income.

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* "Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did." -- TED.com