Over the last couple of days, we have been meeting with a variety of business support providers in Rwanda. Yesterday, we visited one of the micro-finance providers that works in Rwanda, as well as several other African countries. Micro-finance is a critical step in providing a meaningful base of new capital for entrepreneurs and small businesses. There is still a severe lack of capital at all levels, although the situation seems to be improving, slightly.
The micro-finance outfit we visited was called Vision Finance and they also took us to see one of their branch offices and some of the businesses that they had helped to support, often with very small initial loans at the $50 or $100 level. These may be used to buy stock or new machinery and can be of enormous value, despite the relatively high interest rate levels that are charged.
One of the businesses that they have supported was a local carpenters workshop. Over four years, the owner has gone from being a one-man operation to employing eight people.
Today, I had meetings with representatives of the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology about the position of universities in the country. There is a worrying lack of freedom for universities to manage their own affairs. This is something that really must be addressed if the Rwanda education sector is to become a regional leader.
What they have also established, with a good deal of support from the World Bank, is a new business incubator, called TBIF.
This is just the sort of facility that Rwanda needs. There are currently fourteen companies located there and ten have already graduated. They range from a small project management company that has just won a contract to assist the government of Burundi through to a web-design business that helps other residents to build their sites.
TBIF also ensures that it offers support to those outside of its walls. They run weekly workshops and training sessions for businesses that cover issues such as understanding cash flow and basic legal advice.
The truth is that this is the sort of initiative that a project like Umubano might have come in to help set up. But here it was not needed and there was little I could offer to really help them develop. They were doing a great job, already, and have received seven African heads of state and Paul Wolfowitz during the last year.
Like many of the projects and programmes here, what both Vision Finance and TBIF need is more contact and exposure for their clients to western businesses and culture. We need to find a way of linking US and European companies and universities to these institutions to help set-up student and staff exchange programmes, in both directions, so that local business people can see what they need to produce and compete with to develop economically at home.
