African startups are ‘over-mentored, over-trained.’ Rwanda wants to fix that.

On March 12, Rwanda’s Ministry of ICT and Innovation (MINICT) launched Innovate Rwanda, a digital platform designed to connect startups, investors, talent, and ecosystem support organisations across the country, on the sidelines of the recently concluded Innovative Fintech Forum in Kigali, the country’s capital.

“We want it to be a platform where startups can discover who else is playing in the field they want to play in,” Esther Kunda, the director general of the innovation and emerging technologies directorate at MICINT, told TechCabal. 

For a young tech ecosystem like Rwanda, the platform hopes to fix the information scarcity problem. The country has over 70 active startups and several incubators and hubs, like Norrsken, but information about these startups and investors has been fragmented because the ecosystem has yet to mature.

“Entrepreneurs starting an idea were not able to find out who is providing the right support for the stage they are at, whether it’s ideation or scaling, or who is offering the right support or funding at their particular stage,” Kunda said. 

Founders can create profiles to showcase their ventures, discover relevant support programs, access funding and partnership opportunities, and connect with ecosystem organisations that can help them grow, she added. 

Outside of Innovate Rwanda, the government is also positioning itself as a direct buyer and often the first customer for Rwandan-based companies through a new public procurement regulation. 

In our conversation, Kunda explained how MINICT wants to fix the fragmentation that holds back the country’s startup ecosystem with Innovate Rwanda and why the government would rather let companies test emerging technologies than wait until it has all the rules figured out.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired the creation of Innovate Rwanda?

From the ICT Ministry’s perspective, one of our key roles is to enable collaboration and coordination of our innovation ecosystem. One of the key issues we kept hearing from ecosystem players was the ecosystem’s fragmentation and a lack of information across it.

For ecosystem support organisations, one of the issues was being able to know what different programmes exist in the ecosystem. It is one thing to know that there’s an innovation hub called XYZ, but information that goes deep into the type of programmes they provide is not readily available. 

For the different startups that apply to their programmes, what other programmes have they been part of so that they don’t duplicate efforts or even over-train them, which is one of the biggest issues that entrepreneurs in Africa have. They are over-mentored, over-trained, and with little support in other meaningful ways.

That’s why we created Innovate Rwanda. We want it to be a platform where startups can discover who else is playing in the field they want to play in. We want people to be able to see what ecosystem support organisations (ESOs) are doing, the kind of programmes they’re running, who else they’re supporting, and how they’re supporting them.

We’ve also been able to aggregate investor data around who has invested in companies that are either based in Rwanda or have operations in Rwanda. So you might have big global companies with operations here. We’re trying to get and perfect the information around who’s investing in those companies so that if you’re a startup in a sector, you can target the right investors and say, ‘Investor XYZ is interested in this sector, so if I’m currently raising, these are who I should be targeting.’

When you run a directory like Innovate Rwanda, getting accurate data is a challenge. How do you think about getting data, verifying it, and putting it up on the platform?

We have done a couple of things, and as we launch, the data is going to improve much better than what we have done so far.

One, we are aggregating data from the different programmes running in our ecosystem. We are working with ESOs, but also with the programmes that the government is running, to get that information.

Two, we have partnered with a global platform that has an algorithm and has perfected some of these ways of finding investment data and information across ecosystems globally. In the last few years, they have done very specific insights into a couple of African countries, and we are starting from that.

The last one confirms that the companies on the platform are actually registered and operating in Rwanda. Some of them today we’re not going to classify as startups, but they feature because they’ve raised funding in the last couple of years, mentioning Rwanda as one of their operations. We’ll be cleaning the data, making sure it becomes reliable. It’s really going to rely on how we, as an ecosystem, share data as we go along. It’s a journey, and it’s going to take some time.

What specific outcomes will you be measuring to determine whether Innovate Rwanda is succeeding?

Let me put it in plain words. If I get a lot of conversation from startups asking me, ‘Where should we go for an innovation hub?’ or ‘We’re raising this amount of money, where should we go? ‘ If this process becomes very easy because of this platform, that’s one metric of success.

The other one: if we can measure the quality of the programmes provided in our ecosystem and start being very ruthless on the quality of innovation programmes in our market, that’s another metric we’ll look at.

Third, and very specifically: increased funding in our ecosystem. That’s very crucial. And also job creation.

What other things is your ministry working on to help startups in Rwanda?

Other than the platform, we have been running our flagship programme. It’s a national startup competition where we crown the best startup every year. Around that, we have several sub-programmes: funding programmes in agriculture and funding and support programmes for startups in sexual and reproductive health.

We also have, together with one of our development banks, a grant programme for startups that are starting, and we fund between $50,000 and $100,000.

Beyond that, we collaborate with different ecosystem players to develop programmes to showcase our startups across the world, attract young people to set up their companies here in Rwanda, and, of course, as a ministry, drive policy and strategy for the innovation ecosystem.

How does your ministry think about attracting foreign tech companies while also supporting homegrown startups? There’s often a tension between the two.

With homegrown companies, the first thing is initiatives like this, where we are really focusing on companies being built here. In terms of innovation hubs, we are also building hubs outside of Kigali so that we can support innovators and entrepreneurs outside of the capital. We want as many entrepreneurs as possible to solve local problems.

Second, as a government, we just gazetted a regulation on public procurement for innovation for Rwandan companies or Rwandan-based companies. What that means is that we are now positioning the government to be one of the biggest buyers of innovation from young companies in the next few years.

Most of these programmes are usually geared towards local startups and locally born companies. And this year and going forward, we are starting to look at how we support them to scale outside of Rwanda so that they can conquer other markets and grow.

In terms of attracting other companies, what we’ve done is create an ecosystem where Rwanda acts as a proof of concept, especially for emerging technologies. If you have an idea and there’s a lack of understanding around regulation, or where you should start, or how easy it is to start, Rwanda is the best place to start. 

As a government, what we practise is regulation by doing, instead of saying we see something we do not understand, wait a couple of years, then come back when we would have figured out the regulation. We are saying: you test, and we learn from what you are testing, and we build the regulation based on what you are doing.

You also have the Kigali Innovation City, where global universities are teaching global African talent. It is one of the best places for an entrepreneur to hire good African talent to scale on the continent.

Through the Kigali International Finance Centre, the Rwanda Development Board also has a one-stop centre. You are able to quickly access incentives as an investor. If you are coming to set up here, there is an investment code that gives you the right incentives. With the Kigali Finance Centre, Rwanda is now second on the continent after Mauritius in terms of a financial centre. We are growing in that space in terms of enabling companies to quickly set up, establish an investment, and run with it.

How are you thinking about positioning Kigali as a tech hub compared to Lagos, Johannesburg, Cairo, and Nairobi?

Each of these cities has very good and unique things to offer entrepreneurs. We consistently position ourselves as a proof-of-concept hub, but also as somewhere you have a diversified African talent pool in one city. That combination allows us to be different from the rest. But it is always up to the entrepreneur to decide what makes sense for them.