Building a Startup Nation: An Examination of Techno-Development in Kigali

This dissertation examines Kigali’s emerging tech ecosystem as a central axis in the Rwanda Patriotic Front’s post-genocide reconstruction project. The Government of Rwanda heralds an ICT-based economy as the pathway to Rwanda attaining middle-income status by 2050, and positions youth as the economic drivers of this vision. In parallel, the global development industry, borrowing from Silicon Valley’s startup culture, has embraced incubators and accelerators as models for market-based poverty alleviation across Africa. In Kigali, these government and donor agendas have converged around a new subject of intervention: the impact-based startup entrepreneur. Anticipating the tensions inherent in subject formation, this thesis asks who and what makes a startup founder in Kigali. I highlight how tech entrepreneurship in Kigali constitutes an identity-based claim, often detached from the material qualities of the startup. For the city’s middle-class youth, becoming a startup founder was not solely a mechanism for capitalistic accumulation, but a complex civic, moral, and political project. Tech entrepreneurship provided ambitious youth with a grammar and terrain of action through which they could envision and pursue desirable futures within a tightly governed state. This thesis is grounded in fifteen months of ethnographic research in the Kigali startup ecosystem, during which I followed local and foreign founders, staff at entrepreneurship support organisations (ESOs), donors, investors, government officials, and other stakeholders. It adds to critiques of techno-development and Silicon Valley Imperialism as experienced in and theorized from the Global South by drawing on the anthropology of development, subjectivity, the state, and capitalist time. Each chapter reveals how Kigali’s tech ecosystem is built on what I term a politics of projections, where various actors’ attempts to materialize a not-yet future, and their conflicting understandings of what makes for a credible projection, ultimately rest on an emptiness of form. Chapters One and Two situate Kigali’s startup ecosystem within its historical and political context. They show how the RPF’s promise to enact a future techno-utopia is both underpinned and undermined by its re-narration of Rwanda’s genocidal past. Concomitantly, Rwanda’s global styling as a model of neoliberal good governance obscures the endurance of a patronage- based economy. Together, these chapters highlight how political subjectivity and sociality in post-genocide Rwanda are structured around layers of concealment: citizens are socialized to act in line with state projections while maintaining an awareness of the ‘underneath of things’. The following chapters examine how this acting as if is reproduced within the tech ecosystem, and how local and foreign founders learn to embody promises about the future. Chapter Three highlights how ESOs train youth to cultivate the ‘right’ entrepreneurial dispositions as aligned with donor agendas. Chapter Four demonstrates how local founders leverage this performance of entrepreneurship towards their own social and political ends, while highlighting the limits of ‘bluffing’. Chapter Five documents how venture capital has shifted the performance of entrepreneurship towards a promise of continent-wide speculative enrichment. This final chapter argues that development’s increasing financialization introduces another layer to this politics of projections, one that legitimizes the reproduction of global wealth inequalities.