Rwanda is growing, is young and need capital and innovation.
If you are really into entrepreneurship, you want to make a whole lot of money and have a significant impact to the world it is the place you want to be.
Way easier to build the next cool apps for millenias will be to make the next big soap factory in Rwanda, can you bootstrap a soap factory ? Maybe... Will you make a big impact on the local economy ? For sure.
Definitely not easier, but if you make 100$/hr with 5 hours of your work you can buy 1 month of Rwanda worker time (I am being extremely conservative.)
Have you been to Rwanda? It is a land-locked country surrounded by countries with terrible road infrastructure and corrupt border crossings. It costs more to get a container from Dar to Kigali than it does to get a container from China to Dar.
Rwanda is unlikely to ever become a place where physical goods are manufactured at scale: it costs too much to import raw materials and too much to export finished products even if you can get all the raw materials locally. You can sell into the local market, but it is a very small one.
It is an interesting place to be if you want to work on some kind of knowledge product, ie, software or services, micro-work etc, but even then it comes with its own set of challenges, it is no slam dunk.
Source: I lived there for over four years and cofounded a small software company there (http://nyaruka.com), which eventually built TextIt. (https://textit.in)
This. I tried (and failed) to build an export business out of Uganda. I am sure that somehow, somewhere somebody will make a fortune - but it wont be easy.
This kind of thinking is appealing on the surface. It's what drove me to spend some time working for an Indian MNC in Mumbai.
We were trying to sell internally to what is known as "bottom of the pyramid" markets - the large proportion of the population that makes about $100/month. These live 5-10 to a room, and something like a fridge is a massive improvement in quality of life as being able to store food means one less day a week trekking to the market and one more day to do some work (oddly enough, they still buy a TV first).
Turns out being local is not much help. White goods? The Koreans have more efficient factories and more innovative design. Next time you're in the countryside, check out how much of the store they occupy. FMCG (including your soap)? Hello P&G and l'Oreal. Lest you think they don't understand their markets, I spoke to the salwar kameez-wearing CEO of a large FMCG foreign group for India, and he told me he spent his weekends driving his Royal Enfield in the countryside, to better understand his customers. Some groups like Reliance or TCS seemed to be doing alright, it seemed to be both about having the right connections, and arbitraging the salary differences by selling to the West and paying locally.
I came in thinking I was so smart with my degree and fancy internships in world class businesses, but the Indians knew the business well, in fact my boss for the project knew the MIT and Harvard profs who were at the time leading operations research on a first name basis and had regular phone calls after a few Boston trips. I gave up after a few months and returned to countries where I had some kind of market value.
The MNC had enjoyed a near half century of tranquillity. Until the end of the License Raj (in 1991), it was practically illegal to become a large company (and you'd spend 2-3x your capital just in administrative work if you were a startup) so they had a monopoly on a few markets. Opening to global markets meant that the foreign companies, which already had experience operating at scale and in emerging markets, had a field day.
Really, the only scenario where you might have an edge is if you are a connected national and you get some kind of trade restrictions set up. But you generally don't want to be operating in such a country anyway.
I agree, you're probably better of partnering with a trusted friend who grew up there, and knows the market a lot better, who needs a little money starting a local restaurant chain, or perhaps provide funding for businesses in markets that are artificially restricted to locals (for example, perhaps there is a country where the owner of a mine must be a local - you could provide funding for minority ownership).
Obviously trust, connectivity, infrastructure, etc are the major issues for investing in the 3rd world.
It is very easy and tempting for a local to take your investment and run off. It helps to live there, get to know the workers, build a relationship etc. It is better to find a ngo or local company that is already recognized and running successfully and help them with their mission.
Isn't $500 ~ 6M IDR about what you'd expect from a basic office job in Indonesia? I would have expected that an IT job would be more. Your English seems very good, have you tried consulting remotely?
This is a deliberately anonymous account. Of course there's no contact info. I do(did) some PHP programming and sysadmining. If you want to know low-end salary ranges for IT jobs where I live, you can go to local job sites e.g. http://id.jobsdb.com/ , select IT, and select e.g. IDR 5M as max. (that just named the country but meh. it's just the facts on the ground)
I was sure all they needed was "general instructors" added to the MOOC mix to make it work. Basically, educational coaches, not teachers. People need to feel accountable to someone else in order to pull maximum motivation.
If you are really into entrepreneurship, you want to make a whole lot of money and have a significant impact to the world it is the place you want to be.
Way easier to build the next cool apps for millenias will be to make the next big soap factory in Rwanda, can you bootstrap a soap factory ? Maybe... Will you make a big impact on the local economy ? For sure.
Definitely not easier, but if you make 100$/hr with 5 hours of your work you can buy 1 month of Rwanda worker time (I am being extremely conservative.)
Some data are here: http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Africa/Rwanda/currency-va...
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?coun...
If you really want to look more deeply about the whole subject: http://www.rdb.rw/