VENTURE AFRICA – Rwandan President Paul Kagame says his government will continue to provide incentives to attract investors to business opportunities in the country.

According to media sources, the landlocked state wants economic growth to remain at 11.5 percent every year, for the next five years. Rwanda also wants to drive poverty from 45 percent to below the 30 percent mark, and attain middle-income status by 2020 — no easy task for an agriculture-based economy.

While speaking to investors from China’s Zhenjiang Province, the President said his government will make the country more investor-friendly, as it aims to push through a transformation from its genocide past.

Kagame thanked the Chinese for being a part of Rwanda’s transformation process and “staying on the course of what we believe in.”

According to him, “[Rwanda] will continue to work towards making a win-win situation possible.” He added that the country’s strategy was not to seek short-term investors, but businesses that will impact Rwanda for a long time.

In a separate meeting with government officials on Tuesday Helen Hai, an expert on China-Africa Investments, expressed optimism towards the policies the country had implemented to facilitate investments, singling out steady infrastructural development and business-friendly procedures as key achievements.

Rwanda’s on-going transformation can also be gauged from the fact that within a decade of launching Vision 2020 in 2000, it emerged the highest-ranked economy in the 2010 World Bank’s Doing Business report.

The country is presently the ninth fastest growing economy in the world, with its 2013 GDP growth projected at 7.8 percent.