$39.2bn: The Money Kagame Needs for his Agenda by 2024 when his Term Ends

By the end of 2024, which is 4years away, same time that President Kagame’s currently 7year term ends, how Rwanda will look like has already been set. The picture was unveiled in September 2017.

There will be 100 percent access to water, electricity, and broadband. Meaning, all these services will be available for all Rwandans living in the country’s 14 837 Villages.

Other headline targets include eradicating extreme poverty and malnutrition; doubling agriculture productivity.

At least 1.5million jobs will have been created – meaning most able-bodied Rwandans will be at work.

In order to reduce cost of doing business and ease of transport across the country; 3,000km of feeder roads will be rehabilitated, 800 km of national asphalt roads will be built.

In the health sector, the 17 sectors that didn’t have a health centre will each have one. 150 new health posts will be constructed at cell level. This, says government, will reduce the doctor-patient ration to 7,000 from 10,055, one nurse per 800 people from 1,142 and one midwife per 2,500 from 4,037.

100% of Government services will be delivered online by 2024 from 40% in 2017.

The list is long and meticulously detailed. The benchmarks were set by Kagame in his victory speech following the August 2017 presidential poll in what was called the National Strategy for Transformation Phase 1 (NST1). The following month, the Prime Minister Dr. Edouard Ngirente outlined the specific numbers in Parliament.

However, what had not been settled is the cost and where the money needed will come from. Now, government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have put together a number, and it is staggering.

“At US$39.2 billion, the cost of NST1 is expected to be shared at 59:41 percent, respectively, between the government and the private sector,” writes the IMF in its review report of the government’s progress in its journey issued January 17.

The government designed a full costing exercise through 2024 to support the NST1 planning and implementation.

And the IMF believes President Kagame and his team will get this enormous amount of money.

It writes: “Public resources should mainly come from improved revenue collection, combined with around RWF3.7 trillion of external financing (mainly loans). FDI should account for about half of private resources. To seek the remainder of private resources, which should be directed toward priority investments with longer-term payoffs, authorities are actively working to use “de-risking” ODA to leverage private resources. Their main objective in this respect is to avoid assuming further financial risks on the government balance sheet.”

To put it into context, Rwanda’s 2019-2020 budget is $3.2b and the country’s current GDP or size of the economy is expected to clock $11b this year.