Forgotten world (26): Rwanda
On five occasions now, I’ve had a week-long feature on NightHawk devoted to parts of the world that tend to be under-reported or even forgotten. You can check out the previous 25 entries here. This week, I plan to run a sixth series of postings on this theme.
The 1994 genocide in Rwanda – when some 800.000 were murdered in just three bloody months – has been portrayed in films like “Hotel Rwanda” and “Shooting Dogs”.
Today the country still faces desperate problems: two-thirds of the 8 million Rwandans live below the poverty line, half are illiterate, and AIDS claims many lives. Four in five Rwandans live in rural areas and 90% of the workforce is still involved in farming. The country is landlocked and it has few mineral resources or oil deposits.
Yet there is an ambitious plan, called Vision 2020, to transform the country into one based on information communications technology. Half of the primary schools have at least one computer and more than 300,000 people have mobiles.