I was in Rwanda this time last year. After visiting ~30 African countries by that point I can say that it's an extremely refreshing change.
There is a bustling tech sector in Kigali - they're making iPhone apps, designing and building hardware, etc. etc. There is a huge community of entrepreneurial younger people. People are extremely well educated, friendly and kind. I never saw a single piece of trash in the entire country.
I felt as safe riding moto taxis around in the dark in Kigali as I do in any Canadian city.
FYI for those unaware, grecy is the guy who recently completed a >50000 mile Africa expedition[1]. This guy knows Africa. It's nice to hear that Rwanda is doing well.
Wow. The coastline of Africa is 18,950 miles (30,500 km), so That’s like looping around the content nearly 3 times.
Here’s what I found on that site:
> I’m doing an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit right now.
Come on over to Reddit.com and ask me any question you have about my three year, 54,000 mile and 35 country expedition around Africa.
It’s all on the table – safety, money, health, budget, visas, route, people, animals, the Jeep.
I know it's likely hyperbole, but...JFC. Would you say an East-coaster who hikes part of the Appalachian trail knows Appalachia? At best, their knowledge is surface-level.
That seems like way too high of a bar for the word knows. Someone who plays the guitar for 3 years certainly knows the guitar, even if they're not great at it. Who would you say knows Africa? Someone who lives all their life in Kongo? They might know Kongo, but probably know less about the varied experiences of Africa as a continent than someone who spends 3 years traveling around the whole of Africa.
Rwanda is known to be up-and-coming and is doing better at solving their problems than South Africa. At least, their derivative at this point in time looks much better.
Cape Town already has a good tech scene and is a great place to move to for programmers, but I would like to see sustained tech progress in SA's other big cities and then places like Rwanda or the eastern African countries.
>Rwanda is known to be up-and-coming and is doing better at solving their problems than South Africa
I mean, South Africa certainly has its problems, that's for sure. But I mean, Rwanda? With its disappeared opposition, assassinated dissidents, and child soldiers securing Tantalum deposits in Congo?
I don't know man? South Africa certainly has its problems, but even under Apartheid, you didn't see them sending child soldiers into neighboring countries. (Not that sending adult soldiers to secure diamond mines is that much better than sending child soldiers to secure tantalum deposits I suppose? But it just seems not as bad to me.)
Yes, so I agree with you on the human right topic but I think for the Rwanda argument to make sense you should restrict to the last five years or so. I feel pretty wary of Kigama, but maybe they will have a smooth transition to the next guy? Of course, in five years from now it is possible that SA again looks better in their rate of immediate progress than Rwanda.
Also how most people are so scared shitless of anything like the genocide happening again (beyond understandable obviously) and thankful to Kagame it hasn't, they don't really seem to mind too much about the terrible shit he pulls, because it so clearly pales compared to "the alternative", however false a dichotomy that might be.
It's done them well, but at some point the mindset will have to change.
Just hasn't done much for the thousands slaughtered in Congo.
Guy's a murderous turd and the worst kind of genocidal thieving resource warlord. Represents everything Ghana, Senegal, South Africa etc are trying to relegate to history books in Africa. Sooner he's gone, the better for Africa. People won't look at Africa as being quite so barbaric when a certain set of leaders finally die off. Kagame is definitely chief among them.
Question, from a network engineering perspective, what does the ISP scene in Rwanda look like? Who are the ten largest ASes, what exists for an IX point, and where are the bottlenecks for international transit connectivity?
It sounds like they did the design locally and manufactured the boards and case and other such mid-level components. Presumably the highest-end components like displays, processors, and other ICs are imported.
So it's not really manufacturing the entire device locally, but it's a good first step. You gotta take these steps to build local expertise before you can think about building stuff like IC manufacturing that's local in a meaningful way. It sounds like they're on the right track, and I wish them the best.
They "manufacture the phones from the motherboards to the packaging" ... perhaps the case, motherboard, packaging, but still importing the components, in particular the system-on-a-chip and display? In that case, "made entirely" wouldn't be accurate.
Great list. Also a reminder of why they call it Silicon Valley after all... Maybe Rwanda will push towards researching making their own chipset. ARM is kind of a spec and not some specific processor is how I have understood it. You take the spec and design your own processor from it.
I missed that bit, and I didn't think about SPARC / MIPS to be fair. Wasn't there another one recently opened up by IBM? Isn't RISC or RISCV? I only focused on ARM because then you can usually take advantage of Android. I do wish there were competing phone OS' though that were open source as well.
The best measure I know of this is -- cost of the final product minus cost of imported inputs, or that divided by cost of final product.
Ultimately what matters is things like how much value is created in the local economy (employment), and how independent they are from loss of their source of imports.
Just as one data point, I personally hate the Apple logo and am heartily sick of seeing it everywhere and I loathe the way they feature it so prominently on their laptop lids so that I do keep seeing it continually.
After my deep dive into reading about the Zipline Drone company (who first deployed at-scale in Rwanda and now serve virtually the entire country with rapid, fully electric airborne blood and medical product delivery), I learned just how well Rwanda is doing economically. Very vibrant, indeed.
They are led by a paternalistic figure who helped stop the genocide and has high support in the population. It's not as democratic as I would like, and the Rwandan meddling in Congo isn't exactly clean, but trajectory of Rwanda to middle income country status is commendable. I worry about Kagame's admiration for the Chinese model of development, though. I guess an advantage of Africa versus China is the nations are more numerous and so power is more disperse (possible exception: Nigeria by the end of the century). I hope a gradual trajectory toward prosperity for all, freedom, and peace take place on this continent.
There is a bustling tech sector in Kigali - they're making iPhone apps, designing and building hardware, etc. etc. There is a huge community of entrepreneurial younger people. People are extremely well educated, friendly and kind. I never saw a single piece of trash in the entire country.
I felt as safe riding moto taxis around in the dark in Kigali as I do in any Canadian city.