This post is a proposal for Matter’s International Reporting Fellowship.

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East Africa’s Silicon Rift

Juan Herrero photographer/videographer

Wyatt Orme
radio reporter/writer

Tik Root
producer/writer

Within walking distance of the shimmering, Chinese-made high-rises of downtown Kigali, a group of young Rwandans gather for a birthday party. Linda Ndungutse, the birthday girl, is turning 27 and already a successful designer who runs her own fashion start-up. Among this crowd, though, she’s far from unique.

Many of the guests know one another from kLab (k for “knowledge”), an open technology hub in the city where innovators meet, mingle, and are encouraged to develop their ideas into business models. Some, like Linda, have gone on to run their own companies, while others work in the rapidly burgeoning landscape of tech startups. The vibrant group is among those leading the way into the country’s new economic frontier.

Rwanda has come shockingly far in the twenty years since it suffered through a genocide that left nearly a million dead and many more displaced. Despite a near total lack of natural resources, GDP grew at an annual rate of 8% over the last decade, making it one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Poverty and inequality have dropped precipitously as well, and some are even boldly dubbing the country ‘the Switzerland of Africa.’

It seems that President Paul Kagame — the longtime leader of Rwanda, who is also known as the ‘digital president’ — has positioned the country for an extraordinary leapfrog from an agrarian to a knowledge-based, service-oriented economy. At the forefront are Rwanda’s youth, whose entrepreneurial spirit is palpable and who are driven to continue moving beyond the nation’s scars. But their coming of age could very well be double edged.

More than half of Rwandans were born after the 1994 genocide, and the population is expected to double in the next twenty years. If not already, those young people will soon need jobs and it is yet to be seen whether the economy, still dependent on foreign aid, can bear the burden. Young Rwandans are also bound to test Kagame’s carefully orchestrated political stability. Moreover, their ability to reconcile potential internal tensions (the tech savvy elite vs. the still struggling rural poor, for example) is, until now, untested.

As Rwanda gets ready to hand the reins to Linda, her friends, and the rest of the post-genocide generation, the question becomes whether or not the nation will continue to be a model in the East African Rift.

We propose a long-form multimedia piece that explores how Rwanda’s youth (the tech culture and its counterparts) will transition to power in a country that is well on it’s way towards revival but whose future remains murky. While text would be a primary focus, we plan to combine video, photo and audio components into a piece that we believe will actively engage people in this already compelling story.

Together, we bring a skill set perfectly suited to produce this package. We all have a proven track record of reporting internationally and bring complimenting expertise to the table. Perhaps most importantly, however, we are ourselves millennials and would be covering twenty somethings for an audience overwhelmingly made up of that same demographic.

Reporting will be based in Kigali, but include trips to rural Rwanda (Butare, home to an important university, Ramagana in the eastern province and other stops). We have made contact with a number of business incubators (including k-lab), journalists, and schools. We also plan to connect with other experts, officials and youth. We hope to spend about 3 weeks in Rwanda and complete the trip before April 2015 (when activity in the country begins to slow down for summer).