Kigali, 4 February 2015
President Kagame today received the Secretary General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Houlin Zhao who is on the third day of his visit to Kigali.
Houlin Zhao told press after the meeting that his discussions with President Kagame dwelt a lot on the cooperation between ITU and Rwanda and also focused on key issues like the upcoming World Summit on Information Society, promoting small and medium size entrepreneurs, Broadband development, and specific issues like the 150th Anniversary of the ITU, upon which President Kagame shared his good wishes to the union.
“We also talked about Smart Africa, the President’s initiative that was jointly launched together with the ITU last year that presents a lot of opportunities to facilitate Africa’s development. President Kagame is no stranger to the ITU because he has been deeply involved with ITU since 2010 and believes in the power of ICT, which is the reason why despite his heavy schedule, he accepted to co-Chair of the ITU Broadband Commission and has been instrumental in pushing for Broadband connection not only in Africa, but the whole world with the objective of bringing new technologies to change lives. Under his leadership the Broadband Commission has received tremendous world support and he has promised me he will continue to offer his support.”
The Minister of Youth and ICT, Philbert Nsengimana said President Kagame and the ITU Secretary General had made a commitment to support, expand and strengthen the Smart Africa Initiative and also promote Small and Medium Enterprises as a new initiative as avenues of enhancing African development.
During his visit, Dr. Zhao visited the ORN 4GLTE Innovation Center, Cyber Security Centre, CMU Rwanda and KLab and pledged commitment of the ITU to make Rwanda a regional center of excellence.