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Building Science, Technology, and Innovation Capacity in Rwanda presents the methodology, policy conclusions, and detailed action-plans that emerged from a World Bank science, technology and innovation (STI) capacity-building programme in Rwanda in 2006–07. This book illustrates that even such an economy as Rwanda that is currently dominated by subsistence agriculture needs to develop STI capacity to address everyday issues such as providing energy and clean water to rural areas, and to compete in the global economy.

The objective of the Rwanda Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) programme was to help Rwanda build the STI capacity it needs to identify, design, and implement practical solutions to a series of everyday practical economic and social development problems. These problems fall into two broad categories: (a) improving the lives of the rural poor, reducing poverty and achieving the Millennium Development Goals and (b) generating wealth, diversifying the economy, and supporting private sector initiatives to produce and sell value added, natural resource (mostly agricultural) exports. With a per capita income of only US$0.71 a day, Rwanda needs to boost per capita income by 40 per cent just to lift people above theUS$1 a day poverty line.

Both challenges entail building STI capacity. Fortunately, much of the science, engineering, and technical knowledge needed to achieve these objectives already exists and is widely used outside Rwanda. Unfortunately, this knowledge is not being applied in Rwanda. From this perspective, therefore, the STI capacity-building challenge is to train farmers, entrepreneurs, engineers, technicians, scientists, and teachers to find the appropriate knowledge, import it, adapt it to local conditions, and use it to solve local problems and produce and market higher-value, more knowledge-intensive goods and services.