 Hello, and welcome to this press conference at the World Economic Forum on Africa in Kigali Rwanda, where the Government of Rwanda launches the Kigali Innovation City and signs strategic partnerships with Mastercard, Ericsson and the Government of Jersey. My name is Maxwell Hall, and joining me on the panel is Raghu Malhotra of Mastercard, Francis Gattare of the Rwanda Development Board. Frederick Yydling of Ericsson, Claver Gertetae, Minister of Finance and Economic Planning of Rwanda, and Philip Francis Ozouf, Minister for Financial Services, Digital and Innovation of Jersey. Thank you. Without further ado, I will pass over to Francis Gattare. Thank you. Thank you very much, Max. Good afternoon everyone and welcome once again to this special press conference. We are very delighted this afternoon to have signed a various memorandum of understanding with these companies. But most importantly, I want to say that Kigali City for Kigali City is a special day in our endeavor to implement an innovation city strategy that requires us, A, to have a platform for a cashless economy in our city and for cashless services for all the transactions that we conduct in our city. And so it's a very special day for us to have entered into this relationship with the Mastercard. And for the details I would like to call upon Mr Raghu Menhotra to elaborate more on the details of the partnership that we just signed for today. Thank you. Thank you very much. So we are very privileged to actually have signed this partnership with the Rwandan Government. I know a lot of you think of Mastercard as a credit card company or a payments firm. But over the last four or five years we've transformed a fair bid as a company ourselves. Just we've moved beyond just our consumer centric business to our advisory business and our services business. And our stakeholders have moved from financial institutions to merchants and governments. So this partnership with the Rwandan Government is a testimony to how we are taking our business forward. Now I just want to just talk a second about this partnership. So this government as a stakeholder and services as a business is all about creating infrastructure, enabling infrastructure at an economy level that drives the vision of various governments and actually makes it a reality. That's what this business is all about. And actually a partnership is exactly about that. So there are three pillars to the partnership as a start and I say that as a start. The first one is financial inclusion which is aligned to creating the middle income segment as per the vision of the government. So there's Rwandan Government has a vision of creating a middle income segment and our financial inclusion partnership is the first leg of that. The second one is driving efficiency in the healthcare education and social disbursement side. So that's about taking transaction costs down, having a better consumer experience and just based on the reforms that the government is doing to take that forward. And the last and fairly important and not the least is creating the digital infrastructure and enabling the digital infrastructure for to implement the 2020 vision of the Rwandan Government on the digital side is what the third leg is all about. So enabling the digital infrastructure for the country is the third leg of that partnership. And obviously the cashless part comes as all three legs on that. With that I should get off my surf box and just hand it back in to hold. Thank you. So you will have a chance to ask specific questions that time will be coming up. But before that I would like to request Minister Clever Gatete, the Minister of Finance to also elaborate and introduce the signatories that we just had with both Ericsson as well as the Government of Jersey. Minister Gatete. Thank you very much, Francis. Again, this afternoon we signed two very, very important agreements. One with Ericsson. I'm sure that all of you sitting here should be very much excited because the whole debate was on technology and transformation. And one of the benefits is the financial sector. I hope none of you has cash with you at this point in time. We've been used to actually going to the ATM with drawing money all the time with that kind of inconvenience. Initially it was a solution but at the same time it is like moving the lines actually from the banking system to the ATM. Because you didn't have what they call the interoperability that links your phone that you have with the card and with other means to make sure that everything can be done wherever you are using any means. That means that actually the money stays in the banking system and that means the money can be lent out. That reduces the money that we all carry in our pockets. And this is what they are trying to do. They are bringing an infrastructure that is going to enable the system to work closely together that you can move money from any bank to any other bank, regardless of who the owner is. And we have to do it at the national level and then at some point we'll work with them to scale it up to the regional level where we need to do cross-border mobile payments. This is a very, very important initiative. Another one that we had, of course, that we talk about is Gersi. Gersi Government, we've been working with us in agriculture and other areas. And then we decided this is the right time for us to have a double taxation avoidance agreement which went through the department. And now it is legal. Now we can work with them. We have a facility that allows the people of Gersi, the companies there, to work with our companies together having an agreement, a formal agreement that protects their investors and also allows our investors to also invest in Gersi. And now we are moving to another step, saying how do we take this forward also to have a bigger cooperation? They are known to have expertise in the financial sector where they are a world leader. They are also known in the technology sector. They are known in agriculture. Actually we've been bringing some of the cooperation that has been in agriculture for quite a long time, so not only in agriculture but livestock for quite some time now. But now we are expanding it to all the other areas, the ICT, the financial sector, the private sector side and other services that are going to help the government of Gersi and our country to make sure we have a very strong cooperation. So let me start with Ericsson to tell us the good news. And by the way, you are allowed to share the good news. Don't keep it to yourself in as much as it's good for you, it's also good for others. Ericsson, please. Thank you so much Minister. And again we are also very proud to be here and we are very happy that we now signed this agreement. And I think Minister explained extremely well what it is about. And basically, first of all let me say we are very proud to partner with the SMART Rwanda initiative here since a little bit over a year back where we work on various solutions for SMART Rwanda. This interconnection switch being the first that comes out of life and hopefully other things coming. When we look at the interoperability switch it is really about creating a digital economy. And the basic facilitator for that is seamless financial services. And as Minister explained, we are also part of this already through M-commerce systems with various operators here in this market as well. The challenge we saw is interconnecting all these worlds. And to facilitate the seamless system from the world of Visa, MasterCard into the various mobile money systems. And this is exactly what this platform does. So it's an interoperability switch that can facilitate transactions among the different sort of islands in the financial world if I put it like that. So with that, you have achieved a couple of things. First of all, if everybody wants to do bilateral agreements with each other, despite the way it becomes very big, interconnecting to one central platform of course simplifies that and brings speed into the process. And obviously by bringing big volumes of transactions into the system over time of course you can get a low transaction cost which is one of the basic hurdles for including people in the system. So it's the first step to digitising economies and a very important such. Thank you very much indeed Minister. We are delighted to be here today to sign the agreement that we have. We think this is a great day for Jersey and we hope also a great day for Rwanda. The MOU as Minister you kindly said cements and strengthens a long term relationship that has been of real importance to Jersey. I should say I'm a farmer's son but today I'm the Minister responsible for financial services, innovation, digital and competition. So everything that we've been speaking about in terms of innovation city is very close to my heart after I discharged the functions as also finance minister for six years. We started with the one cow per family project. Now we're going to move in a real tangible way in the MOU with a way to deliver on the president's dream, minister's dreams, the Rwandan dream of becoming a middle income economy, knowledge based economy and also importantly as a regional hub. The increasing single market within the region is of vital importance and if we in Jersey can offer anything in our experience as an island, a small island then we stand ready to assist Rwanda in its development. We are optimistic about Rwanda and delighted to be here. So now you can see that the innovation city is a whole range of issues. I would say products. We've already heard the Carnegie Mellon University best there. We've already heard the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences best there. We have had our young people the Caleb. I don't know why I didn't see anybody old really. We are almost excluded from that, but we are glad that at least we have the young people that are there. We have companies in the IT and now we are adding on almost a day by day. So if you can see the line up here, I'm sure you have no doubt that the innovation city is going to become a big innovation city and everybody wants to become part of that. Thank you. Are there any questions? Can we see some hands? Can we get a microphone over here please? Are there any other questions? Any more hands? Hi, I'm John Aglianby from the Financial Times. Many of our readers, a question for Minister Gatete if anyone else wants to comment. Many of our readers don't pay that much attention to Rwanda. It's not the biggest economy in the world. So maybe you can take a step back please Minister and tell us what you're really trying to do, what the vision is, why these math, how these fit into the bigger picture of development. Innovation city is great, but there are an awful lot of Rwandans who don't live in Kigali. What are you doing for them? How this is going to help them? Try and put this in a bit of a bigger picture for the development of Rwanda. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm sure if you had time you should have read our vision 2020. We wanted to become a middle income country by the year 2020 and we are on a course actually to achieving that. But at the same time we realized that we wanted a knowledge based economy. We didn't want an economy based on natural resources which you don't have much of. And from that time we've been embarking on reforms, trying to see how the service sector could become the lead and it should be driven by the IT. The people we are seeing here, seated together here, are part of the story of the ICT. When you start in the year 2000, we started to show the IT vision for 20 years. The first five years it was for synthesizing the Rwandans that IT is important in everything, in government, in the private sector, almost in every sector. Another five years it was just making sure we have the hard infrastructure, the broadband infrastructure up to 2010. And now we are seeing how do we benefit from that kind of infrastructure, which is across the country now. And that infrastructure now that we are benefiting, especially some of the financial sector have benefited so much. Let me just give you an example just for you to understand. I remember when I was in the central bank before that it was very difficult to do any transfers from one bank to another to do any kind of settlements that we are doing because the technology wasn't there. But when you got this infrastructure then we started the Rwanda integrated payment system. And now we actually convince the banks that they need the top 20 core banking systems, the T24, the FrexTube, the Delta, so many others. And these are the core banks system that you can find in any European or North American banking system. And because of that it has allowed now to move resources, to move money very fast. It allowed us to introduce the switch. It also allowed us to link the banking system with the capital market. And not only that, it also allowed us to link with the region. Now we have the East Africa payment system. It also allowed us now to be, right now we are linking the capital markets so that we can have cross-border trading. We couldn't have done that if we didn't have the technology. And to do that, meaning that actually is contributing to the whole economic development. Right now the service sector is for the 70% of a GDP. The IT sector itself, the services are contributing 3% of the GDP. Average Africa is way below that. And we are seeing this one becoming another big contributor and transforming the economy. In as much as to contribute, it also assists all the other industries in terms of innovation, in terms of adding value. And that's why for us, this one contributes to our vision 2020. And we are looking at it very closely as we move to the vision 2050 that was announced last year in our national dialogue. And saying, how do we consolidate this? How do we make sure that we create the brain, the training, the innovation that is needed to drive this one forward? How do we bring in the companies? How do we bring in the research? And that's why we are establishing an innovation fund to make sure that we can help young people to take this one forward. Can I ask? I want to raise a few other issues that perhaps some of your readers should take note. I mean the readers of Financial Times as to why some of the leaders in industry like MasterCard and Derrickson and others are paying attention. The reason people are beginning to pay attention and have been paying attention for quite some time is the following. One is, Rwanda's economy has been growing steadily over the last 10 years on average between 7% to 8% consistently. What this has meant is that the well-being of Rwanda has improved including but not limited to the GDP per capita multiplying by more than 300% over that period of time. Leading to investments in infrastructure, in healthcare, in education that has increased the well-being of Rwanda that makes them a viable market. I think people need to pay attention to this. In the ICT sector, which is the sector that unites many of us here on the table today, we have seen tremendous growth. For example, leading to close to 100% connectivity across our country, where almost 60% now of our country is covered by the 4G LTE broadband. Now there are not many countries in Africa that have caught that level of internet connectivity and IT infrastructure in general. I think readers of FTO to begin to pay attention if they haven't yet. Thank you. I hope when you are here you are also benefitting because the telephone penetration is around 78% and the internet is 33.7%. I hope you are also benefitting from this while you are here. If I may add, not many people talk about Jersey because we are a small island. Jersey is an island, apparently that's a disadvantage. People used to say that Rwanda had it as advantage because it was landlocked. What I've seen in my visits here over the last few years is an incredible story that needs to be said to your readers of the Financial Times, to the British people and to the international community. It is a remarkable story of growth built on some solid foundations, a zero tolerance of corruption, a long-term vision of infrastructure investment. All what Minister says about the investment in technology is absolutely vital. The technology opening up of infrastructure is going to open up the world to Rwanda to be able to trade in services. We are Rwanda optimists in Jersey and we want to encourage others to. There is not a disadvantage of smallness or landlocked. It's an advantage, small, fast moving and principled quality standards and we want to get that message to other people around the world. If I could just add one thing. I say this is a partner of the Rwanda government and many people would have asked us as well saying, of all the countries you can choose of, why did you choose Rwanda? I'll tell you two reasons. First is it's got great governance and the vision of the government is actually aligned to doing good for the people. That's a fairly important reason of our partnership in that. The second thing is you have to look at Rwanda and what they've done. This could be the model that the other developing nations of the world need to adapt. It's not just about what Rwanda would end up doing with the infrastructure and the partnership. Your readers might start to think of saying that's probably the way the rest of the developing world needs to create a framework for growth for the people. Thank you very much. I'm called Dias Nesega. I'm a journalist with the Chigari today. Honourable minister, there is no doubt that Rwanda has taken a step into investing in technology, especially in the financial sector. But there is still a challenge of cost. When you go to see the transactions, especially electronic transactions, the cost is a challenge to a customer, to people who are transacting. On the other side also, I remember in 2012, you told us that the cost is due to low transactions. We've seen an increase in transactions and still the cost is high. Last beginning this year in Feb, financial institutions added around 42.000 francs on each transaction on ATM. Honourable minister, don't you think that this one is actually another challenge towards achieving our cash rush economy? Thank you. Thank you very much. First of all, we have to be sure that you are talking about the right cost. For us financial inclusion, the reason why it has reached where it is now, you remember in the year 2008, when we did the first survey of the financial inclusion. And we find that actually only 42% of the Rwandans were included, formally and informally. And the government took measures to increase the circles, the savings and credit cooperatives all over the country. And then because of that, the banks also extended their networks. And by the year four years later, only 2012, when we did another survey, we saw a very significant improvement. From that angle, we saw that 72% of the Rwandans were included, formally and informally. And then for this year when we did another one, again after another four years, we realized that actually we have now reached 79%, sorry, 89%. Now we are ahead of the game into that. And why did that one happen is because there were many banks that came on board. There were many microfinance institutions that came on board. And then the cost started coming down because of the technology to employ it. Now the cost you are talking about is the cost of using the ATM. Actually what you are looking at is, why would you withdraw the money in the first place? We want you to not bother carrying the money. And that's why we are bringing in people like the MasterCard, the technology they are bringing in. So that initially in the year 2009, actually the currency outside the banking system, the money that is in your pocket, you are carrying and someone else and someone else. It was 27% of the broad money. That's a lot of money outside. It means you are keeping it, I'm keeping it and nobody has access to that money. But once we introduced these other systems, then it brought it down to 9% today, 9%. But the international standard is between 2% to 5% so that there is very little money outside. There is only more money in the banking system so that you can lend it out to more people. But if it is outside the system you cannot have a hand in it. And that's why we are bringing the interoperability initially for the ATMs. Interoperability is what you can withdraw from any cash machine. But now we are saying actually shouldn't be withdrawing that money. You should actually use your phone or your card to do anything. You want to do the shopping, you want to pay someone, you want to buy fertilizer as they are doing now. You want to buy anything, you can use your phone or you can use the card to do the payment because of the POS and other things but you don't need to do that. But if you look at all the costs that make up the transaction, it has significantly come down. Actually three years ago in the central bank when they started implementing it, the costs actually were coming down. I remember one of the costs I would say in the whole banking system of the connectivity. It came from over 2 million, it came down to 300,000. So it has all come down for all the banking system. If you look at the cost for each of the banks, it has come down significantly. You are talking about the small component of how much they charge you to go and withdraw the cash machine. But we are trying to say that actually you should not be withdrawing because of the importance. But otherwise the impact has had on the financial sector is quite incredible. Another question here? Maybe he wants to add something. Honourable Minister, even point of sales for a merchant is charged money on every transaction a customer does. Now this means most of them actually even in here in town they rather tell you the machine is dead or they are not working so that you can use cash. Now first of all tell me anywhere in the world where someone will give you free service because there is a POS, they have to charge a service. It has to be a reasonable service. Anywhere in the whole world there is nowhere you get a free POS because someone is giving you a service. That's why for us we are saying those service charges should be as low as possible. And we are also using it also for the Rwandans ordinary people. You just compare the Irembo, the Rwandan line that we have put in place for example. If you have to travel a long distance, get transport, come to the district headquarters just to get a service. Look at the money that you paid, look at the time you've wasted and then call that on a cost. And you have reduced that by saying you can do it in your home, you don't have to travel but also cheaply. So the cost is relative to what else would you have done? Would you have gone to the bank, withdraw, take your transport, go there, withdraw the money where they charge you also, and then go and make the payment or you'd prefer to use the POS or you'd prefer to use even a phone. Someone has to give you a service, there has to be a charge but what you are trying to do is to make sure that the charge is reasonable. But of course you cannot dispute and say I want to get everything free. No, it has to be a reason that we charge because they are providing you a service. Thank you. Are there any more questions? We have one down here. Any other questions? We can see any hands. Thank you very much. I'm called Banana Metawak for the East African. My first question is to government officials, how much is this project costing you? To the issue of mobile phones, we've seen that. There are many projects. Which project? Who is your question? Smart Africa. The smart initiative with Ericsson. How much is it costing you? My second question is related to the cost of devices. We've seen that for instance despite the investment in 4G, the cost of mobile phones has sort of slowed down the penetration. What are you going to do around reducing the cost of mobile devices? The second question is to MasterCard. What is the side of the bargain government? What have you agreed with government in the short term? What must they do within the momentum of understanding? Thank you. Let me just say one thing and then my colleagues will be coming. For MasterCard, they are coming as an investor. They are installing an infrastructure that is going to allow interoperability. Government is not paying anything. We've just actually convinced them to come as investors. And then from there they will be providing services. Ericsson. Sorry. Which one did I say? Don't worry, they are not paying us either. In the promise that was the already problematic incident. When you say that, especially for competitors, that is very dangerous. So it's Ericsson that they are coming here as an investor. So we are not buying them because you can't afford them. But they are coming here as an investor to be able to provide the services. Then for the phone penetration, I don't know where you are reading from because the current phone penetration, yes, I'm saying, yes. The handset of smartphones. Yes, I don't have the latest data on the number of handsets. But I know that the phone penetration has been going up like this. I don't have the latest numbers, maybe the people in IT can help us. 78% is the phone penetration, but in terms of the devices, is the one that I think is wrong. But the penetration is 78%. Yes, phone penetration. But the phones that you have here, they are not only from Ericsson. I think they are from all the other companies, and it is demand and supply that we normally apply. So the number of phones and where we buy them, I don't know if it is consistent with exactly the cost that you are talking about. But it is going to explain more. No, I can just mention, first of all, we are not in the business of making phones anymore. So we haven't done that for some time. But when it comes to smartphone pricing, if that's what you're talking about, that is your right, that is the biggest hurdle for penetrating out, of course, the price of the handsets. And you can do different studies on that. But when we really look at it across the one that the way you design your spectrums and all that, it's very standardized, meaning that every component that goes in there is very globalized. Meaning that actually the cost for producing any handset now that we have harmonized all the spectrum, including the LTE spectrum that you are working on now, is pretty competitive. And I get back to the point that I don't know what you pay for a smartphone here, but in my view you can get a good smartphone for about $40, $50 at this stage with a decent screen. And they will probably come down further on that. The studies we've shown at that breaking point around $40, $50, you see quite a high pickup of smartphone penetration. But it differs from market to market. But there's one thing that's for sure that the production cost and everything that goes in there due to the global standardization of the systems is pretty optimized. A few short remarks from MasterCard. You know I did spell out the partnership. So I'll just kind of very quickly summarize what I talked about. So it's about financial inclusion. I think the minister talked about that. It's how do you create that middle class that we're looking for. It was digitization. We talked about some healthcare, education and social benefits. That's the start of the partnership. And again it's about playing the infrastructure to do all these things. So it's not just one or the other. It's a series of things that will come out. Just a few comments from the minister. I can't comment on the Rwandan cost. But what I do know is that that question could be asked of an honorable minister in any country. I hear those questions about the costs of telecommunication costs in my country in Europe elsewhere. What I do know that I think the solution is exactly how your ministers are tackling this issue. You get cost effective services. You get better services by promoting competition underpinned by innovation. By new ideas, by disruptive technology, by disruptive ideas. And that is what the launch of this exciting initiative I think is going to spur. So you're going to see those costs rise, lower barriers to entry, competition, innovation. That's what your ministers are doing and that's why we back them. Thank you. That's all we have time for. Maybe you can learn more. Of course, one round maybe. One more question and then we're done. Thank you. My name is Eugene. My question goes to Mastercard and Ericsson. Just wondering what could be your challenges to implement these programs. We hear things about how fast is our internet, how is our electricity. If you can tell us the challenges you're going to go through. Thank you. So we don't really necessarily see infrastructure as a real barrier to the challenges you've talked about. So because as you will see the rollout happening, I don't want to kind of say too much. You'll realize that the sort of innovation we're going to bring to the market is going to be different. I think the biggest challenge is you've got many parties. There are many constituents in the value chain. All have alignment towards a particular vision. The only challenge will be if one or the other doesn't do it in the same speed and therefore you'll delay the execution. For us that's the biggest challenge because if you can execute flawlessly in a time frame that we're all agreeing on, we feel this is absolutely doable. I think from my side, if I look at the environment that is created here that is very conducive to growth through the policy and the Smarter One initiative, I don't think that is a particular challenge. Actually that is actually an opportunity that I think we're all talking about here. I think when it comes to such a service that we are talking about which has to do with utilizing a sort of cross financial island network of financial services, I think the fact that people actually the consumer actually starts knowing that it can use 78% of people can start using the service, let's say in Q1 2017. I think that education piece and getting it out on the market is probably one of the biggest challenges we're going to have later on. I want to comment on the challenge issue. Look, in every initiative project or whatever strategy people implement, they are always going to be unexpected encounters that are very difficult at this stage to lay out. If we knew about them, they must already be catered for and therefore can't be that challenging. But that said, we anticipate to make no major challenges given the foundation that has been laid in our country for the financial technology and the digitisation of services in our country that is already happening. We are anticipating the public service through the rainbow platform or in the private sector that is happening through the digitisation of transactions. We really believe that the time is right, the technology exists, the market is ready and all that has been waiting was the opportunity to create the investment to begin to get going. With this on board, we just think that the rest is going to be implementation. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much.