Most people hadn’t taken anything more than a lingering notice of Rwanda until 1994 when the genocide that happened there shocked the world. Even then, many ticked a box and marked Rwanda as another place to avoid, in a continent where bad news is more at home than good and tragedy is a staple food in a media predefined diet. I too was in that category. There is so much news to consume; you have to decide what is important and what is not.

So, for me, it wasn’t until I once casually overheard the former US President Bill Clinton, in the news raving about Rwanda and reeling out growth and economic statistics I couldn’t ignore, that I had to go back, dig deeper and take a closer look at this landlocked miracle in the sun.

Even though President Paul Kagame doesn’t like the word miracle, it’s on record that no country has come out of what Rwanda has gone through and still gone on to achieve what it is achieving. Consecutive growth of 7 – 8% for 15 years, meeting all the SDG targets, highest representation of women in parliament in the world, highest enrollment rate of primary and secondary school students in sub Saharan Africa, health insurance that covers over 90% of the population and a one stop business friendly registration that takes place within 6 hours. All this for the second smallest country in Africa. The list goes on.

I’ll spare you the details of what happened during the 1994 Rwanda genocide, most already know; and there is very little, if any, that hasn’t already been said. What amazes me is how they have deliberately pulled themselves up and out of the depths of that despair and relabeled their country to write for themselves, a new story.

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