From Telex to eGovernment: The Birth of eRwanda

Abstract

It is hard enough to believe that in afteen years any country could transform itself from one using telex to one implementing eGovernment, but it is even more outstanding for one that a little over a decade ago emerged from a genocide. My arst visit to Rwanda was in February 1992, two years before the genocide, when I was the newly appointed regional ICT ofacer for UNICEF’s Eastern and Southern Africa Oface, based in Nairobi. It was my arst ofacial country visit outside Kenya, but I had a general idea of what to expect. The UNICEF Kigali oface was using telex to communicate with the regional oface and with headquarters, as we had not yet introduced fax. From start to anish, sending a telex took a minimum of two days: it had to be dictated to a secretary, typed, approved, retyped, rechecked, and anally sent, leaving behind a faded copy in the triplicate. This cumbersome communication system was not solely the fault of using technology from the 1850s but was also related to awkward business processes. Furthermore, these processes were not limited to the UN ofaces; they were de rigueur in most large organizations. In terms of other technology, the oface had two 286 Wang computers, each of them dual ooppies, and they had some rudimentary software such as Wang word processing and Lotus 1-2-3. The use of computers, however, was limited to the few who had been trained, and, besides, the electricity was so erratic that a good old-fashioned manual typewriter was far more secretary-friendly. There was an international phone connection, but it rarely worked. I remember telling my secretary in Nairobi, “If Kigali calls, and I’m not in the oface, keep the caller on the line, and and me, and me, no matter where I am!” I knew I would never be able to call them back. Kigali itself was a sleepy, dusty little African town. No one paid any attention to it in the early 1990s. There were a few dirt roads going nowhere, hardly any vehicles on the road, and almost nothing going on. The oface put me up at the Hotel des Mille Collines, which was, compared to the rest of the country, the lap of luxury. They even had their own generator. During the next two years, between 1992 and early 1994, I began a program of bringing the country ofaces up to the UNICEF oface technology platform. We rolled out some standard hardware and software, but not a local area network, because there were no qualiaed local staff to operate or maintain it. We recruited and trained a technician in basic hardware maintenance—things such as how to connect the monitor to the CPU, take off the cover, and blow the dust out once per month. We started some word processing and spreadsheet training for the secretaries