Via Fast Company, an interesting look at Rwanda’s efforts to rebuild and expand its economy.  As the article notes:

“…The country doesn’t have much going for it. It’s landlocked, largely deforested, and ridiculously packed: About the size of Vermont, it has 16 times more people. Fifteen years after the genocide that killed an eighth of the population, its name still brings to mind death. Nine of every 10 adults are subsistence farmers, and per capita income is less than a dollar a day. Rwanda has no oil and few minerals. But it does have one abundant asset: well-placed friends.

…Kagame’s strategy relies on wealthy and powerful friends to lure private investment, train a new generation of managers, build a globally competitive economy, and wean the country off foreign aid. Even as troubling questions remain about Kagame’s involvement in the region’s ongoing conflicts, this unpaid, business-savvy team is marketing the brand called Rwanda.

Just as the Asian Tigers arose as export-led, middle-income economies in the 20th century, Rwanda wants to become the African Gorilla in the 21st. It seems crazily audacious — and Rwanda’s leaders know it. “We’re trying to create a new model for fighting poverty. Nobody believes that it’s possible,” says éliane Ubalijoro, a researcher at Montreal’s McGill University who serves as a Kagame adviser. “How do you take a country that’s been through hell and bring it to security and prosperity? This is about healing, and this is about hope. We think it can be done.”

…Businesspeople are seen as less likely to focus on geopolitics, so long as the commercial environment stays secure. “In the future, the engine has to be the private sector,” says commerce minister Monique Nsanzabaganwa, who notes that since more than half the populace is under 18, “we need to create jobs to absorb all those young people.” The government surely doesn’t have the money to hire them all. As Francis Gatare, CEO of the Rwanda Investment and Export Promotion Agency, says, “If you don’t have development through investment, you won’t have economic growth.”

So Kagame sends fact-finding missions to Asia. He pursues the Rwandan diaspora. He speaks at Google and meets American entrepreneurs. He recruits more friends. And it’s beginning to look as if his personal strategy — selling people on Rwanda’s story and its promise, telling them that this is a place where they can make a difference as well as profits — just might work.

…Since its launch in September 2007, the Presidential Advisory Council has become a high-level, low-profile dispatch team and brain trust. All 16 members — 10 are non-Rwandan — are stars in their sectors, from life sciences to telecom to economic-development consulting. They meet twice yearly, once in Kigali and once in New York, for strategy sessions. One member observes wryly that “it’s the consultants” — Monitor Group cofounder Michael Porter, Aslan Global founder Kaia Miller, and OTF Group cofounder Michael Fairbanks — “who do the most talking.”

It isn’t just talk; the council has delivered visible results. Tony Blair established a program that sends civil servants from Whitehall to work in Kagame’s office. Arkansas investment banker Dale Dawson created a scholarship for Rwandans to study in the United States. McGill’s Ubalijoro helped broker a multimillion-dollar deal with Canada’s Ecosystem Restoration Associates and Germany’s Ecolutions to reforest denuded land and develop alternative energy; the plan is to sell credits on the global carbon markets and split the profits with the Rwandan landowners. Christian Angermayer’s Frankfurt-based financial-services company launched an East Africa private-equity fund that has invested in a Kigali bank and a Rwandan banking-IT company. “Rwanda is a place [where] we can make money and also make a huge difference,” says Angermayer, the only council member who has significant investments in Rwanda. “The best thing we can do is not to give charity, but to treat it as a normal economy.”

…There was no clearer sign of that than a startling investment Rwanda made last summer. The country plowed an eight-figure sum into a small U.S. biotech company. (Officials declined to name the company, citing its pre-IPO quiet period.) The money came from the nation’s social-security funds, which led the company’s CEO to fret that if the FDA doesn’t approve the firm’s therapies, he won’t be losing the money of just another multimillionaire investor but of an entire country — and one of the poorest at that. An adviser to Kagame — who personally gave his approval and even increased the amount of the investment — responded sharply: “You’re going to tell this man about risk?”

This is typical. Rwandan officials often defend decisions not with arguments about merit, but with incredulity. You’re going to question this president? The one who rebuilt a country and created one of Africa’s few relatively corruption-free havens? It’s a clever silencing tactic at that moment. But later, the memory of it only magnifies the enormous daring — and risk — of the venture that is Rwanda Inc.

One of Rwanda’s fiercest advocates is a mustachioed Chicagoan with a crushing handshake. Joe Ritchie, who made his fortune building and then selling a company called Chicago Research & Trading and is now Cooper’s partner in Fox River, cochairs the Presidential Advisory Council. Last summer, after the council suggested that Rwanda needed to streamline its bureaucracy and have just one go-to agency for development, President Kagame created the Rwanda Development Board and named Ritchie CEO.

Ritchie, 68, is a lifelong adventurer. He flew a chase plane for the late Steve Fossett, and before the September 11 attacks, he and his brother sunk millions into fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, where they spent part of their childhood. (Their father was a civil engineer who taught in Kabul and was buried there.) He first heard about Rwanda from one of his daughters, who did volunteer work in the country.

So far, the biggest payoff of his advocacy may come from a partnership with the U.S. rail titan Burlington Northern — Santa Fe. Rwanda’s poor transport links boost the prices of both its imports and its (few) exports. After Ritchie spoke with BNSF chairman Matt Rose, the company agreed to advise on design and construction of a rail link between Kigali and Tanzania’s Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam. Rwandan officials say the ability to use the company’s name has opened doors with potential rail builders and operators.

…The model for the agency is Singapore’s development board. In 2007, Kagame took a team to Singapore to study how the country turned itself from a regional trading post into a global business capital. But while there are parallels between the two nations — both are run by strong, postcolonial governments whose democratic credentials are widely questioned — Singapore has advantages that Rwanda does not, from its outstanding education system to its geography to its fastidious reputation. (It annoys President Kagame that foreigners often don’t know that Rwanda, too, is tidy. At a speech in Boston last year, an American rose during the Q&A time and praised Kigali for being surprisingly safe and clean. Those in the audience recall that the president called the guy out. “What did you expect?” he said. “Did you expect us to be violent and dirty?…”