A while back I needed one person. Just one. Someone who could take a half-trained language model, fine-tune it to Kinyarwanda, and make it sound natural to the common Rwandan. So, I made a list of people in Kigali who could do that work. Two names. And both were already booked solid for the year.
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That is the part of our Artificial Intelligence story that somehow never makes the headlines.
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On June 8, the Cabinet approved a National Artificial Intelligence Agency, the first standalone AI institution on the continent. The coverage treated it as a milestone, and in a way it is.
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Rwanda keeps doing the thing it does well. It moves first. We had the first national AI policy in Africa back in 2023. Now the first dedicated agency on the continent. Once again, we planted a flag before anyone else got out of bed.
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When ICT and innovation minister Paula Ingabire launched the national policy, she said 70 per cent of it was focused on skills. Seventy per cent! The whole thing came down to one thing. People. Without the people who can build, the rest is paperwork. She was right then, and she is still right now.
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The big question here remains. Does a new agency fix a talent shortage, or does it supervise one?
Those are two very different jobs.
An agency coordinates, convenes meetings, writes frameworks, signs partnerships. Useful, all of it. But none of it produces a single engineer. The talent exists or it does not, and if you have tried to hire for it here, you know how thin the bench is.
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It gets harder. The few we train rarely stay. A good Rwandan AI engineer can work remotely for a company in Berlin and earn in a month what a local contract pays in a quarter. I do not blame them. I would do the same. But it means our pipeline has a hole in the bottom. We pour skills in at the university and watch them leak out to richer markets before they build anything here.
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And nobody outside the room yet knows what this agency actually is. No budget, no timeline, no staffing. We have a name and a mandate. We do not have a shape. That is normal this early. It is also the exact moment where good intentions either become a working institution or quietly turn into another org chart with a nice logo.
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I should be honest. I am not neutral here. I help run a small software company that would benefit directly if the talent pool got deeper. When we cannot find the person we need, our projects slow, our clients wait, and the gap between what Rwanda promises and what Rwanda can deliver grows a little wider.
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So, I will continue to watch the headcount of people who can actually do the work growing year on year. If those numbers move, the agency was worth every franc. If they do not, we will have built a very tidy place to manage a shortage we already had.
Rwanda is good at being first. Now we have to get good at being deep.
The real test will be whether my list of two names becomes a list of 20, and whether when those 20 arrive, this new agency knows what to do with them.
The writer is an MIT-certified AI professional and the Head of Business & AI at Global Kwik Koders.
