The 1 Page Development Report

[I'll get back to the Reinventing Foreign Aid commentaries soon, the third essay requires me to do some extra background reading on statistical methods.]

I attended a memorial yesterday for the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide held by the local Rwandan diaspora. It was a beautiful, touching and long service to help both the healing of the survivors and to ensure that no one, least of all the children of the diaspora, ever forgets. The keynote speaker was Steven Kinzer, author of A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It.

"The Man Who Dreamed It" is the very intelligent, charismatic and controversial Paul Kagame. Kinzer reported some 30hrs of interviews with the new President of Rwanda, including asking him why, of the all the millions of pages of reports written on how to develop Africa and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, the place was still such a mess. In typical Kagame fashion, he replied "I reject the premise of your question. Everyone knows how to develop Africa, but no one has been willing to do it. You don't need reports that could circle the continent, you just need one page."

Kinzer: "Okay, what, in your opinion, should go on that one page?"

Kagame: "It all starts with one fundamental thing. Without this nothing else matters, so don't even try."

Kinzer: "And that is?"

Kagame: "Security, internal and external. If people are not safe they will not leave. What good is building a school if the army is going to come steal the windows and doors? You must have security to start, otherwise the rest is meaningless."

Kinzer: "Once you have security, what comes next?"

Kagame: "First health, because if people are unhealthy they can do nothing. After that is education, because we live in a knowledge economy. Next is infrastructure, good roads, airports, internet so people can do business. After that you must have a good business environment because it is your entrepreneurs who will bring prosperity. And all of this must be administered by a government that is honest and not corrupt. There, one page, but no one has had the will to implement it before now."

The "now", of course, is Rwanda itself. The ethnic tensions tracing back to the Belgian practice of clearly defining Hutu and Tutsi are still there, simmering under the surface. Among the diaspora, anger at those who participated in or did not intervene in 1994 and before then is palpable, as well it should be. In Rwanda, these feelings are directed not at abstract concepts like "countries" and far-away people, but rather at their neighbors. Paul Kagame, and most everyone in Rwanda today, knows that it is only the advancing prosperity of the country that keeps everyone looking towards the future rather than looking to settle the scores of the past.

Can this development be sustained? Only time will tell, and the sharp reductions in global trade we're seeing today can't help. The history of "Jewels of Africa" in the 20th century is not good, but here's to hoping that the lessons of history can be learned and, more importantly, implemented.