The Orderly Entrepreneur

Youth, Education, and Governance in Rwanda

Catherine A. Honeyman

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780804799867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The first generation of children born after Rwanda's 1994 genocide is just now reaching maturity, setting aside their school uniforms to take up adult roles in Rwandan society and the economy. At the same time, Rwanda's post-war government has begun to shrug off international aid as it pursues an increasingly independent path of business-friendly yet strongly state-regulated social and economic development. The Orderly Entrepreneur tells the story of a new Rwanda now at the vanguard among developing countries, emulating the policies of Singapore, Korea, and China, and devoutly committed to entrepreneurship as a beacon for 21st century economic growth.

Drawing on ethnographic research with nearly 500 participants, The Orderly Entrepreneur investigates the impact and reception of the Rwandan government's multiyear entrepreneurship curriculum, first implemented in 2007 as required learning in all secondary schools. As Honeyman shows, "entrepreneurship" is more than a benign buzzword or hopeful panacea for economic development, but a complex ideal with unique meanings across Rwandan society. She reveals how curriculum developers, teachers, and students all brought their own interpretations and influence to the new entrepreneurship curriculum, exposing how even a carefully engineered project of social transformation can be full of indeterminacies and surprising twists every step of the way.

Part I

Envisioning the Orderly Entrepreneur

Figure 1 A clean Kigali streetscape

Source: Photo credit Odessa Cozzolino.

Chapter 1

Creativity, Credentials, and Controls

A FEW MILES OUTSIDE of central Kigali, our car rolled through a rural town featuring the same cluster of businesses that one can find just about anywhere in Rwanda: tiny shops selling dry goods, a few places to get a cup of tea or fresh milk, and a group of youngish men waiting around for customers to ride on their bicycle taxis. Only the buildings painted with advertisements for a telephone company (bright yellow) and a popular kind of beer (bright blue) added variety to the otherwise dusty brown of all the buildings.

Past the trading center, my research assistant Flora and I continued along a rutted dirt road to a public school, where a few hundred students in uniform were leaving their classrooms to go home for the day. A small group of students remained, occupying the school canteen while they enjoyed a cup of sweet milky tea and square mandazi doughnuts.

These students were members of the first nationwide cohort to study the new course in entrepreneurship implemented by the Rwandan government in 2009, and they would soon graduate from Rwanda’s nine-year basic education cycle. Like their classmates, they had kindly agreed to participate in a focus-group discussion for this research. Our conversation began with the students talking about their families and their hopes for the future. For several minutes, they spoke passionately about the problem of youth unemployment and how it would affect them. “Who do you think is responsible for solving this problem?” we asked.

One student raised her hand: “It’s each one of us, personally. Maybe you don’t sit at home, [but instead] you go sell something [. . .] Create a job for yourself, selling. Or maybe go outside, because there are many people in the countryside that want things, for example cloth. You could go and bring things to sell even in the countryside, not just stay in the city.”

“Me, I think that people could make an association,” her classmate added. “Let’s say, groups of, like, ten people, to look for the kind of work they’ll do together.”

Nodding, another classmate continued: “Don’t refuse any job, do what you find. Don’t underestimate the value of a job, [be willing to] use your arms.”

These students had apparently learned their entrepreneurship lessons well. A consensus seemed to be developing among the group: the responsibility for solving Rwanda’s problems of youth unemployment falls on the individual; all the country needs are more entrepreneurial citizens who understand the value of hard work and take the initiative to create their own jobs.

Checking that we had understood their perspective, we asked one more time: “So—if you had to choose between, for example, the government, the wealthy, employers, or the population in general—who is most responsible for solving the problem of unemployment?”

To our surprise, four other students spoke up simultaneously, apparently directly contradicting their classmates’ earlier remarks. “It’s the government!” they exclaimed.

“Why the government? Let me hear each one of you,” Flora probed.

“Because it’s the government that makes the laws,” one student began. “They make it so that people come to a common understanding, and then that’s how [unemployment] can end [. . .] You see, the authorities, when they tell the population to do this and that—if they say to go make associations, then people will do it. But if they don’t say anything, then they aren’t giving you the right to do it. There could be a time that you create something without permission, and then it fails; you see that they have refused to allow you to do it. And then there are those taxes, too, and everything. But if they established a regulation to say that ‘such-and-such group will do this’—for example, weave people’s hair—then people will say, ‘let’s do that,’ and then they would get together to do it. In that case, poverty could be defeated and there would be work available.”

Her friend added, “But that all depends on the understanding of the people [. . .] If they don’t agree, the government can’t do anything—because then even if the government made a law, the population wouldn’t follow [. . .] But if people understand and agree, then the population will join together. And then the government can make a law, and the people will get together and look for a kind of work to do in order to develop and advance.”

Again, other students in the group nodded in agreement. A new consensus had apparently been reached: solving unemployment in Rwanda depends not only on entrepreneurial initiative but also on government regulation and a population willing to be regulated.¹

. . .

Self-reliant yet strongly state-regulated—this particular approach to entrepreneurship and national development is a recurring theme in Rwanda today. In government offices and in policy meetings, on radio and in the newspapers, in the classrooms of every secondary school, and in towns and cities around the country, this same idea is disseminated, discussed, encouraged, and enacted. To understand the outlook for youth livelihoods and even personal identity in contemporary Rwanda, one must first explore this intriguing paradox: in Rwanda, calls for greater entrepreneurial self-reliance and creativity jostle elbow-to-elbow with expectations of increased governmental regulation and controls. What that paradox looks like in practice—and whether it is viable in the long term—is the question at the heart of this book.

Regulated Self-Reliance and the Orderly Entrepreneur

In much of the world, Rwanda is best known for its complex and emotionally fraught history; but what is happening in Rwanda today is no less significant. The first generation of children born after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi is just now reaching maturity, hoping to take up their adult roles in Rwandan society and economy. Rwanda’s postgenocide government is also forging an increasingly confident and independent path, characterized by its own emerging philosophy of business-friendly yet strongly state-regulated social and economic development. Even as some Western countries continue to debate the reasons for their recent economic crises, Rwanda has confidently settled on a strategy for twenty-first-century economic growth that draws on the recent experiences of a number of East and Southeast Asian regimes. Combining a strong-state “developmental” approach with certain entrepreneurial ideals learned from free-market neoliberalism, these countries are pursuing a new form of governance that is quickly rising to prominence on the global scene.

Conventionally, developmental and neoliberal approaches to governance have been framed as contradictory (Fishlow, 1994). Neoliberalism emphasizes free-market mechanisms and individual responsibility, and characterizes government as an obstacle to growth. In contrast, developmental states privilege state-centered economic intervention and planned development, with strong confidence in the guiding power of state regulations. Despite these apparent contradictions, however, a number of governments are experimenting with a combination of these two approaches, in what might be called a neoliberal-developmental (Liow, 2011) or post-developmental form of governance (Baildon, 2009; Ismail, Shaw, & Ooi, 2009; Ong, 2006).² Regardless of the particular label one favors, a number of states with dramatic recent histories of economic growth—including Singapore, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and now Rwanda—seem to be converging on a style of governance that places an ethos of regulated self-reliance at its core.

The following pages explore how this rising style of governance takes shape in practice, as it is re-created in new contexts, and as it is interpreted and reinterpreted by policy makers and citizens alike. Using Rwanda as a case study, I examine the internal tensions of the post-developmental state through an investigation of one iconic policy initiative—the Rwandan government’s decision that a course in entrepreneurship should be required learning during all six years of secondary school. This policy, I argue, exemplifies how transformations in economies and governments are often deeply intertwined with learning processes—both within and outside school walls.

In late 2007, the Rwandan government published a new national policy document, the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS) for 2008–2012. Among hundreds of recommendations, the EDPRS document called for the secondary school curriculum to be revised in order to include entrepreneurship as a major topic of instruction (Rwanda, 2007). As a result, when today’s Rwandan secondary school students graduate, they have spent nearly five hundred hours learning about entrepreneurship over the course of six years of required classes. During that time, they have learned about entrepreneurial qualities such as initiative and creativity, and they have been introduced to the basics of business planning. They have studied various forms of commerce, basic commercial law, and accounting methods. Yet they also graduate into an economic context in which many formerly common microscale enterprises are now illegal or discouraged, in which some rural forms of entrepreneurship are channeled into specific mandated activities, and in which government oversight of business registration and taxpaying is increasingly far-reaching and effective.

On the one hand, this policy of entrepreneurship education suggests that young Rwandans should be self-reliant; creatively and resourcefully finding their own ways to make a living and move ahead. On the other hand, the same policy—along with Rwanda’s extensive regulatory regime—insists that this very entrepreneurial resourcefulness must be orderly, regulated, and to some extent strategized and planned from above. Today’s Rwandan secondary students, in short, are expected to become a generation of orderly entrepreneurs.

Development’s Next “Top Model”: The Post-Developmental State?

Changes are afoot on the global political and economic scene. Following the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, a flood of commentators and analysts began asking—regarding the economic systems that seemed responsible for the collapse—“If not this, then what?” For the first time in years, free-market principles that had become largely taken-for-granted truths in much of the world began to be questioned in mainstream public conversation. If the United States was ever considered the global model to follow, that no longer seemed to be the case—eyes everywhere began to turn in search of other options. “Whether new political and economic policies will emerge from this [financial] crisis, and what forms they may take,” an issue of the journal Development Dialogue began, “are among the most important political and social questions of our times” (Brand & Sekler, 2009, p. 5). It was as if a new competition had suddenly opened up in the field of international development, in search of the next “top model” (see Birdsall, 2011, fig. 2). A transformation in the dominant approach toward economic management and governance, in other words, began to seem truly possible—potentially on a world scale.

Many commentators have suggested that countries with a stronger state role in the economy—such as China and Singapore—came out of the financial crisis in a new position of prominence and prestige, poised to become models for developing countries like Rwanda (Birdsall & Fukuyama, 2011a, 2011b; Callick, 2008; Chen, 2011).³ And indeed, prior to the crisis Singapore in particular was already enjoying a rising reputation for its effective management of economic growth.⁴ For eight consecutive years, the World Bank (WB, 2015) has listed Singapore as the easiest place to do business in the world. The World Bank Group also launched the “Singapore Hub” think tank to “leverage Singapore’s expertise and the WBG’s global development knowledge and operational experience for the benefit of developing countries” (WB & Singapore, 2010). Also reflecting the international interest in Singapore’s approach to governance and development, the Singapore Cooperation Enterprise—Singapore’s answer to bilateral development agencies—was set up not as a donor organization but as a consulting firm, intended to “respond effectively to the many foreign requests to tap into Singapore’s development experience” (SCE, 2011).

Figure 2 A commentator discussing new models for international development on the rise

Source: Courtesy of the Center for Global Development (www.cgdev.org).

As a model, reference to present-day Singapore calls attention to its simultaneously business-friendly policies and effective regulation, economic development with strategic state involvement in certain sectors, a combination of individual responsibility and social welfare policies, and maintenance of order and orderliness—albeit through far-reaching social regulations that are sometimes labeled “authoritarian.” Advocates for the “Singapore model” characterize the government’s approach as that of a benevolent strong state. Singapore’s style of governance, they argue, has led to “one of the highest standards of living in Asia [. . .], benefited the vast majority of citizens, and given them full opportunities to develop their human potential” (Teo, 2008).

Singapore’s economic success in the latter half of the twentieth century—like that of Botswana, China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand—has been ascribed to its “developmental” state characteristics (Johnson, 1982). In all these states, “power, autonomy, and capacity” were sufficiently centrally concentrated to allow the government to “shape, pursue, and encourage the achievement of explicit developmental objectives,” in the process deliberately determining the conditions of economic growth (Leftwich, 1995, p. 401). Guidance, regulation, and control were central features of the developmental approach to governance.

From an anthropological perspective, and following Foucault’s (1991) writings on governmentality, the developmental state’s emphasis on regulation and controls could be considered the enactment of a particular political rationality—an underlying form of reasoning that specifies, in numerous subtle ways, the appropriate goals for governance and the means for achieving them. Conventionally, government is thought of in terms of legal and administrative structures. But the practice of governing also involves complex and often unstated personal and social understandings: our assumptions about what it means to govern others and ourselves (Dean, 2010). Each particular governmental rationality is linked to technologies of power—programs, techniques, documents, and procedures—that structure the range of choices available and that promulgate governmental assumptions down to the level of citizens’ very conception of themselves (Bröckling, Krasmann, & Lemke, 2011; Dean, 2010; Foucault, 1991; Lemke, 2002; Rose & Miller, 1992; Shore & Wright, 1997; Shore, Wright, & Peró, 2011).

Developmental state technologies of power, in combination, produced citizens who not only were highly regulated but also, more particularly, were willing to abide by regulations as part of their participation in the nation’s development (Liow, 2011; McVeigh, 1998; Moon, 2005; Ooi & Limin, 2002; Sung, 2006). This shaping of citizen identity in developmental states was partially accomplished by harnessing citizen participation in highly structured and examination-centered formal education systems in which educational processes and credentials were explicitly tailored to meet the needs of national development programs (Ismail et al., 2009; McVeigh, 1998; Sung, 2006; Trocki, 2006). In this respect, education systems in developmental states acted as disciplinary technologies (Foucault, 1975), establishing and reinforcing norms at the same time as sorting individuals into hierarchies of worth in relation to government plans.

Yet citizens’ acceptance of these highly stratified educational systems, just as their acceptance of strong state regulation in general, depended on the ability of the developmental state to guarantee a correspondence between educational credentials and economic opportunities (Sung, 2006; Trocki, 2006). Developmental states earned citizens’ willingness to be regulated by promising certain tangible benefits: an effective and ongoing process of economic development and the guarantee that those who followed the rules would be awarded jobs and social roles in a continuous process of upward economic mobility ...