Rwanda: The Advantage of Being Small

HE Paul Kagame

It has never occurred to me to be either proud or embarrassed of hailing from a small place. Nor do I believe that small entities are inherently better or worse than larger ones.  All groups, after all, are made of up of individuals, one after another. This is the deeper meaning behind abstract concepts like “inclusiveness.” Every person counts. What they think matters.

But there is no doubt that physical size is a factor in how a country or a business responds to threats and opportunities.There are small countries, but there are no small peoples. It follows that thinking big, and acting big, are choices available to all of us. Size is not destiny. But I can think of two ways in which Rwanda’s relative smallness works to our advantage.

First, it makes it easier for us to innovate. There are no off-the-shelf remedies for our predicament. We have no choice but to experiment with new ideas and bring the ones that work to scale as quickly as possible.

It is no accident that many of the biggest and most innovative companies in the world today began as small start-ups in someone’s garage. Without the constraints of bureaucracy and precedent, original thinking can flourish.

In a way, Rwanda is like a collection of start-up governance institutions whose mission is to solve problems and create new opportunities. If we were bigger, our approach maybe would have been more conventional and less effective.

Second, when you are small, it is a lot easier to get everyone involved. In our culture, as in most others, there is no substitute for talking face-to-face. Personal interactions remain an essential method for rebuilding trust in society, and changing mindsets, such that ambitious visions actually get translated into the billions of choices that citizens collectively make, each and every day, about their health, finances, and security.

So yes, there are benefits to being small. But there is a big catch too: It means you are also small enough to fail.  A mistake that a larger entity could absorb can completely wipe out your company or erase all your country’s development gains, or even plunge you into war. Small places have much less room for error. No one will rush to bail you out. In the grand scheme, the fate of a small place only really matters to the people who live in it. We have to be responsible for ourselves.

No amount of success will ever fully dilute this risk. Iceland, for example, if I may dare to give one, is as advanced a country as any, but its prosperity was nearly destroyed during the financial crisis. These are the realities I have in mind whenever I remind Rwandans that “nobody owes us anything” and that we can never afford to take our progress for granted. We must always strive to become better and better versions of ourselves.

Greatness is a choice available to any person, organisation, or nation. Big countries are capable of thinking small and acting small. Small countries can think big and act big, which is to say: With dignity and respect for others.

In Rwanda, we found answers appropriate to our context, but the principles we used to arrive at them apply more generally: Include everyone, build consensus, take responsibility, and be accountable for results. If Rwanda can transcend its tragic history, then anyone can. No matter how intractable today’s global challenges may seem, we should meet them with confidence and optimism.

More than ever, we are all in the fight together. Globalisation means that opportunities spread faster and farther. But threats move just as aggressively, whether we are talking of pandemics, terrorist ideologies, transnational crime, or stock market panics.  Big or small, we inhabit the same small world, and so we have to make the right choices, for the right reasons, for ourselves and for each other.