President Kagame spoke about the need for Africa to get the politics right to unlock development potential. Photos/Urugwiro Village.
President Kagame says if African countries can address the issues that hamper development such as band governance and destructive politics, the continent can realise its full development potential, by leveraging the demographic dividend of its young population.
The Head of State made the observation at the Youth Connekt Africa Summit 2024, which opened on Friday, sharing his own history from his youthful days, pointing out that he was born and grew up at the time when himself and his parents were forced to flee to exile due to the bad politics that characterised Rwanda at the time.
President Kagame, who appeared on the panel with Prime Minister Sam Matekane of Lesotho and Kenyan entrepreneur and changemaker Mumbi Ndungu’u, said that growing up as a refugee in a neighbouring country taught him to be resilient and determined, regardless of the challenges at the time, but perhaps what dampens his mood is the fact that reasons that made him and many others refugees still remain up to today.
Growing up in exile and later joining forces with others to liberate the country from bad politics, taught him valuable lessons, which young people can learn from today and apply in their own context.
“We grew up experiencing things that taught us many lessons, things that you don’t learn in school but you learn in life. I asked my father when I was twelve, who I lost when I was fifteen, “What did we do? Why are we here?” We were in a refugee camp, being fed with weekly rations,” President Kagame during the Intergenerational Dialogue.
“My father told a long story, but it was clear that it was politics, the leaders. It was a convergence of colonial times and the times of independence. Everything was just what it should not have been. Those are the lessons we learned. But it is disheartening that what I am talking about then, so many years ago in the sixties, some of that is still happening even now,” he added, without naming a country.
President Kagame was part of the Intergenerational Dialogue
President Kagame has previously spoken about the situation in the Eastern Democratic of Congo (DRC), where Kinyarwanda speaking Tutsi communities have been hounded and subjected to decades of violence and hate speech, forcing many of them to become refugees. Rwanda is hosting nearly 100, 000 of them.
President Kagame spoke about challenges of bad governance, which often lead to conflict, affecting what the countries would be doing to advance development and facility young people to be part of the development processes.
“You have people, especially young people, who are still suffering because of politics and all kinds of bad governance. What I experienced when I was four years old, why should it be happening now anywhere? Why should it happen anywhere on our continent?” President Kagame said.
The Head of State said that Africa has everything it needs to be where it wants to be in terms of development, but the aforementioned challenges cannot let the continent prosper to desired levels. He said that addressing the challenges the youth face and putting in place what they need to stimulate their productivity, including infrastructure, can be a gamechanger.
He pointed out that there is no doubt that the majority of the continent’s population being youth is a great asset which the continent can leverage to economically transform itself, but that depends on many other factors, including having the right politics that promote good governance.
“What is obvious is that we have the numbers, the next step is to work out the quality of those numbers. We have to invest in our different systems that the young people need, whether it is education, but there is something we always forget even as we provide education, healthcare etc, which is calling upon them [youth] to participate in the development process.” President Kagame said, emphasizing the need to involve young people more.
From Businessman to Politician
Lesotho Premier Matekane shared his own story with the youth, revealing that before he ventured into politics, he started from scratch, from a peasant family, where he would interchange school days with his brother, so that they can take care of animals, which is a difficult path for boys in his country.
“You’ll find that in a week, someone goes to school twice, the other one three times next week, it will be other way down,” he said, adding that regardless of the challenges, he persisted and later started doing informal businesses, slowly progressing until he became one of the most successful businessmen in Lesotho.
“Having some job opportunities Is a very good thing and we really encourage it,” he said, telling young people however that venturing into entrepreneurship at a young age can be difficult but more rewarding in future than having a job.
He observed that it is even easier to start out today because there are more tools to facilitate business, such as access to education, digital platforms and improved communication and mobility methods, as opposed to when he started out back in the day, at the age of 20. PM Matekane said that his first business was a concrete brick making project before venturing into other businesses.
PM Matekane shared his story, starting from scratch to becoming a top businessman and Lesotho’s Premier.
He urged young people to be patient, more innovative and consistent in what they do, for it to yield results, pointing out that it took him a while to become a renowned businessman and later politician, but it was mainly because of his determination and ambition.
On her part, Chief Changemaker Mumbi said that it is time African countries embraced adaptive technologies and infrastructure that enable young people to be versatile in their work, relying on modern technologies that make it easy for people to work or study from wherever they are, but that goes with changing a lot of things.
“The future of work is not linear. It’s Dynamic, it requires a lot of agility, especially around education. How are we training? Our young people? Why are we taking so long to revise curriculums in universities in schools? Because now it means that a lot of young people are missing out,” Mumbi said, emphasizing a need for radical changes in the education system.
“There’s a lot of conversation around technology. So, the future of work is heavily going to be reliant on technology. How are we leveraging this opportunity as Africa? This moment to do that and we young people who have skills to use adaptive technology and use it as conduits to empower the other different sectors that they may require it,” she said.
It was full house. More than 3,000 young people are attending Youth Connekt.
Mumbi said that at Power Learn Africa (PLP), they have already leveraged the power of technology by innovating around education, and providing scholarships to train software developers across the continent and get them opportunities for work.
“We were launched about three years ago, and so far, we’ve been able to train about 15,000 young people across the continent of Africa, Fifteen thousand by stream. That is a huge number, but if you see the actual need for the demand, the actual gap, we’re not even scratching the surfaces yet,” she said.
Ahunna Eziakonwa, United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Assistant Administrator and Director of Regional Bureau for Africa, recognised President Kagame for having the vision to start the Youth Connekt Summit in 2017, and it has since become a platform to accelerating the implementation of Agenda 2063, stating that he rose to the challenge
by connecting African youth for socio-economic transformation. It has been adopted and implemented by 33 African Member States.
“We have not stopped to accompany Youth Connekt because it is indeed an idea whose time had come,” Eziakonwa said, adding that what President Kagame envisioned then has become even more relevant today, with the challenges the world is grappling with.
“We didn’t realise that you had had a vision that would make Africa so relevant to the world today, that is so deeply divided, a world that is almost unravelling with so much uncertainty, so much polarisation. Today we’re not talking about a unipolar or bipolar world. We’re looking at a multi-polar world that is emerging,”
“What comes with multipolarism is quite a bit of confusion and what that then calls for is stronger multilateralism,” Eziakonwa said, adding that the Youth Connekt Summit has become a strong platform for young people of the African continent to come together and chart their own path into the future.
UNDP Africa Head Eziakonwa speaks during the opening ceremony.
Emphasizing the importance of the theme “Jobs Through Innovative Skilling,” the UNDP Africa Head said that discussing skilling young people is an appropriate theme because it coincides with the African Union year of Education.
“Without equipping our young people, we will have an Africa that continues to lose its value and resources to others, because we don’t have a population that understands how to leverage what it has for its own well-being, and its own future. So skilling is extremely important,” she said, urging the youth to also focus on building character as they go.
Eziakonwa mentioned some of the challenges the world faces today, including greater inequality than it had never seen before, where the top five percent own more than 90 of the world’s wealth.
“This is not a future that we want to sign up for. We want skills that start by building character that insist on the values that make us one human community,” she said that if the values of ‘Ubuntu’ could prevail, the world’s wealth could be shared equitably.
Eziakonwa later met and held talks with President Kagame at Urugwiro Village on the growth of YouthConnekt and Timbuktoo, a UNDP initiative designed to strengthen the African start-up innovation ecosystem.
Established in 2017, YouthConnekt Africa is a continental initiative aimed at accelerating the implementation of Agenda 2063 by connecting African youth for socio-economic transformation. It has been adopted and implemented by 33 African Member States.
YouthConnekt Africa operates as a platform to address critical development challenges by fostering ecosystem-building, knowledge-sharing, and continental collaboration. Over the years, it has evolved into one of Africa’s largest conveners of youth-focused policy discussions and business initiatives.
More than 3,000 youth and policymakers from across Africa are attending this year’s summit at Kigali Convention Center (KCC), which concludes on November 11.
