Rwanda's Youth and ICT minister has highlighted low internet penetration, low digital literacy and poor local content development as the main challenges to ICT effectiveness in that country, the Rwanda Focus newspaper reported.

Minister Jean-Philbert Nsengimana made the comments at the launch of the ICT Sector Profile-2013, which is a compilation of indicators that have been selected to measure Rwanda’s ICT sector performance and track ICT for Development (ICT4D).

The ICT Sector Profile-2013 features ICT for Socio-Economic Development in Rwanda for five priority sectors namely, governance, health, education, agriculture and business & finance, with a special focus on tracking the use of the deployed systems and applications.

According to telecoms research firm BuddeComm of Rwanda’s 11.46 million population, 63% of the country has mobile connections and internet penetration stands at 13.6%.

ICT has entered the life of Rwandans as shown by the number of mobile phone subscribers, the number of ATMs that reached 333 and the number of mobile payments subscribers of more than 2.5 million, Nsengimana noted.

“The number of people using mobile transaction is higher than that of those having bank accounts,” Nsengimana was quoted saying.

He added, “We use ICT in increasing finance and as finance increases people acquire ICT, it is a circle.”

The East African nation has been on a drive to promote ICT use and development.  

BuddeComm notes in its profile of Rwanda that “the Rwandan telecom sector has shown particularly strong growth in recent years... As a result, the country is rapidly catching up with other markets in Africa, with increased penetration particularly evident in the internet and mobile sectors.”

“Rwanda’s internet and broadband sector has suffered from limited fixed-line infrastructure and high prices, but developments in the fixed network market are beginning to change this. The operators are rolling out national fibre-optic backbone networks which also allow them to connect to the international submarine fibre-optic cables that landed on the African east coast in 2009 and 2010,” notes BuddeComm.

“Interest from investors in the country’s ICT sector remains strong, particularly during the last few years. An existing deal with Korea Telecom to build a national fibre backbone was supplemented in September 2013 with a deal by which Korea Telecom will build a national LTE network, for which it has secured spectrum and an exclusive licence to operate the network for 25 years,” adds BuddeComm.