Kigali, 28 February 2014

President Kagame today received Elizabeth Littlefield, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and President of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) who is on a tour of East African countries to see OPIC projects.

Talking to the Press after the meeting with President Kagame, Elizabeth Littlefield said:

“We know that this country has made an extra-ordinary success of making an environment that is conducive to investors and is doing extremely well on all the indicators of being a good environment to bring investors in. we are very excited to help trigger that investment and we have discussed at length with the President about what we can do to attract more foreign direct investment in Rwanda. The best advertisement for Rwanda is an investor who has a very positive long term experience here. Many countries throughout the region look to Rwanda on how to create a One-Stop-Shop in getting licenses and whatever else they need and this is a big success for Rwanda compared to the rest of the region.”

The Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Claver Gatete said the activities of OPIC manifest a huge commitment of the United States Government to ensure the cooperation is moving even a step further by bringing in investments in addition to the usual support provided:

“At the stage we have reached, we have been working very hard to create a conducive environment for investments. In a country where there is peace, security, stability and good governance and the macro economy is very stable, the rest is bringing in investors, including the United States to invest here. For investors from the United States, they need a good story so that when they come here they are ready to invest. OPIC is assisting on this not only for investors from the United States, but from elsewhere in the world.”

Ms. Elizabeth L. Littlefield was appointed by President Barack Obama as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and President of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) on June 25th, 2010. OPIC is the development finance institution of the US Government.