Rwanda Development Board (RDB) has come up with three key words for selling Rwanda. RDB is charged with facilitating private sector led development through, inter alia, increased investments, tourism and exports.
RDB CEO, Clare Akamanzi, who is attending the ongoing Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, alongside President Paul Kagame and other officials in the delegation, participated in a panel discussion on “Building Economies in Fragile Markets”.
In the discussion, Akamanzi presented Rwanda as a competitive investment destination with three key and strong selling points.
She said that Rwanda has made itself competitive by ensuring stability, fixing governance, and fighting corruption. “In many fragile contexts, you will find corruption thriving because there is no rule of law, there is no order.”
Rwanda ranks 4th in Africa and the first country in the East African Community in combating corruption, thanks to the country’s zero-tolerance to corruption policy. The country is also one of the most well-governed in Africa.
Meanwhile, Akamanzi noted that Rwanda relied on homegrown solutions by building on them to create value, for example, the One Cow per Family program that resulted in economic and social benefits for the community.
On the role of NGOs and International Development Agencies, Akamanzi said, “a country has to be very clear about what it wants, and everybody else must be part of that. Rwanda did that very clearly. We defined what we want to do and where the priorities were.”
Other participants in the discussion included Raj Kumar, President and Editor-in-Chief, Devex (DevexWorld.com), Peter Maurer, President, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Gelsomina Vigliotti, Vice-President European Investment Bank (EIB) and Mazen S. Darwazeh, Executive Vice-Chairman, Middle East and North Africa, Hikma Pharmaceuticals LLC.
