Can Rwanda leapfrog to the digital economy with ICT enabled development? A case study of a developing country determined to modernize without the traditional model

Sammanfattning: Proclaiming the successful way forward for Africa to modernize continues to puzzle economists and policy makers. Though the region has experienced the highest growth rates for the past decade, no large-scale structural transformation can be observed. Africa’s continuous failure to industrialize has shown that the conventional model of a country experiencing an agricultural transformation and the related traditional industrialization, through creation of a manufacturing sector, has been disrupted. However, technological advancements, mainly ICT, have made the service sector more productive, and globally ICT is one of the fastest growing sectors. This paper looks into the development of Rwanda, a low-income country, on its path of becoming a service-oriented knowledge-based economy without experiencing agricultural productivity growth and the following industrialization. As the ICT sector combines economic activity in both services and industry, but also has fundamentally transformed the way economies operate, the study finds that as innovations constantly spur from ICT and the definition and the limits of the sector continue to adapt, it is too early to tell if long-term growth can be sustained and development achieved. However, the development in modern countries confirm that economic activities increasingly concentrate around the knowledge economy and as such investments in skills and infrastructure for the new business opportunities are necessary.