Innocent Bagamba Muhizi is a senior technology and business executive with more than fifteen years of industry experience in the public and private sector. He was appointed in April 2017 as the first CEO for Rwanda Information Society Authority (RISA)—a position he still holds to date.

Prior to that, Innocent served as the regional CIO for AccessHolding, including leading the digital transformation for three banks across Africa. He has also led digital transformation works in the rest of the telecom and banking sector in Rwanda, including deploying the first e-tax services in partnership with the Rwanda Revenue Authority.

He started his career in the Office of the President of the Republic of Rwanda as the director of IT back in 2001.

Innocent's job goes far beyond the digital government only, and many of the accomplishments of Rwanda and RISA reach far into the digital society and digital economy at large. Rwanda is often hailed as the tech star of all Africa, and for good reasons.

This all has been the result of a long-term effort launched by the Rwandan president Paul Kagame, who had a bold vision already many years ago that his country's future has to be carried by digital and tech.

During Innocent's tenure and under his watch as the first CEO of RISA, Rwanda has reached into deeper transformation of public services in the digital government realm. In his very humble manner and steady effort, he has built up an agency and government-wide mechanisms to be able to meet the country's high ambitions. Yet, he says surely that it all is still only a work in progress, with so much more to learn!

Indeed, do notice in the next pages how heavily the notion of the need and desire for constant learning features in Innocent's thinking and practices, starting from the way he has built it into RISA work and setup.

—SIIM

How Did You Become a Digital Government Leader in Rwanda?

When I finished my undergraduate at the university back in 2001, I was honored at this very young age to be invited to work in the Office of the President of the Republic of Rwanda as the director of IT. At that time, we were really at the infancy stages of Vision 2020, the national development plan that has steered our government's work since.

I worked there for about three years, then went for my graduate training. When I finished my graduate studies, I came back and worked in government for about one more year. Thereafter, I went to the private sector, into the banking industry.

In 2017, I was very lucky to be appointed by the president (which I am forever grateful) as the CEO of Rwanda Information Society Authority (RISA). I was lucky in a sense that there are many other competent Rwandans who could have done the job, but I think the experience from both the government and from the private sector might have added to inviting me to the role.

What Was Your Motivation to Take Up the Calling and Join RISA?

My first motivation is and was my love for my country. Anytime, anywhere I am called to serve my country, it is an honor for me to serve. There are so many people who would love to serve as well. But if you are given that chance, it is always an honor.

Second, I looked at what the vision was, where the country was heading, and looked at what the roles entailed in terms of the digital transformation requirements. For me, it could not get any better. If you are a true digital enthusiast, and passionate about how to use technology for the good of the people in the country, this was the place to be.

There Was a Massive Challenge Ahead—Did You Hesitate at All?

Frankly, I do not think there can be any hesitation if you are called to serve.

Hesitation was the last thing that really came to mind because the opportunities were (and are) immense. When I looked at what was on the table, at the opportunities that were before me, and when I understood that I could contribute to the development of economy, the people, and the whole country—I do not think there could be any more or any other motivation there.

What Were You Called in For? What Were You Expected to Deliver?

We are lucky to have a head of state in President Kagame who is very visionary and passionate about technology. He has had a very clear vision about technology and ICT as part of Rwanda's future. He has also communicated it very effectively; he sells it in a contagious way.

He understood that ICT was not a matter of choice for us. We are a very small country that was coming from literally the ashes. Our only critical resource is people. Looking at the global trends, the only thing that would enable us to grow at the pace or develop the way we wanted was to employ technology. It has been clear from the vision 2020 that ICT or digital tools are not stand-alone things but enablers for many other sectors. I would actually say that it has become an existential aspect for any other sector to grow and we have to make sure that they will be embedded into the depth of any sector in the economy.

That is why when the overall vision was put together, a parallel master plan was also made for ICT. The ICT Sector Strategic Plan became the foundation stone for digital transformation of our country.

The expectations for me and RISA were to deliver concrete steps toward the vision and the master plan: to continue the implementation of the national ICT agenda toward a knowledge-based economy. For example, we had transitioned from the early infrastructure and technology to focusing on the citizen-centered services. The expectation was to use whatever technology or tools to serve the needs of people effectively and efficiently.

What Was the State of Digital Government in Rwanda?

RISA was set up when the digital transformation in Rwanda had achieved very commendable progress already. As I mentioned earlier, there was a twenty-year national ICT masterplan that was broken down into four- or five-year plans, or subplans, for National Information Communication Infrastructure (NICI). In 2017, we were right in the middle of the last of such plans.

The first NICI plan had been about the institutional setup, putting in place the policies and procedures, basically, the laws and other strategies to create the enabling environment. NICI 2 was about laying the foundational infrastructure like fiber backbone and 4G networks. NICI 3 was starting to focus on the digitization of services. We had started to roll out digital services and other government digitization efforts, such as a national portal for citizens to access services, called Irembo; national cybersecurity programs; and public key infrastructure.

So, the digital infrastructure of the government was largely in place and the next phase of the plan, which was called the Smart Rwanda Masterplan, was to take it further to integrate and continue the efforts with the rest of government services.

What Was the Aim behind the Creation of RISA?

The primary responsibility of RISA is to implement all ICT activities in the public sector and second to support innovation and growth in the private sector. In terms of the institutional setup, we have a ministry in charge of ICT and innovation that coordinates the entire ICT sector in terms of policies, strategies, and procedures.

Therefore, RISA does the implementation—of course, in conjunction with other stakeholders from both the public sector institutions and private sector—to aim for synergies and efficiencies.

For example, under the leadership of the Ministry of ICT and Innovation, we have worked with the Ministry of Finance to ensure harmonization of acquisition of ICT goods and services starting from planning, budgeting, through what we call framework contracts. This has a couple of benefits. First, it reduces the costs to the government because we are able to consolidate similar needs and negotiate from economies of scale. Second, it enables us to avoid duplication, when one organization would be doing something that another organization has already done.

What Did You Set Yourself as a Concrete Objective When Starting the Job?

Expectations were very, very high from all our stakeholders for RISA. Now that the organization was in place, everybody expected RISA to be able to provide the technical support to solve any ICT challenge or to provide any guidance on anything they wanted to do that was digital. Yet, the team we had was very, very small, and they could not be able to respond to every need. The team also needed to be empowered from the skills point of view, through upgrade of tools and platforms.

Even with expectations very high, the recruiting of people, putting them in place, training them, getting them to levels at which they are able to offer services is not something that you can do overnight.

That is why we first had to do recruitment. It was a three-year plan of formation of the organization and building up its capabilities. This included having the right teams in place, really setting up the organization and enabling it to deliver.

What Were the First Steps You Took from the Three-Year Plan?

The very first thing was to have a team. The second thing was to have some sort of best practices and standards worked out and published—the ICT directives.

We inherited a team of about twenty staff members, right now we have a hundred-person organization. Recruiting and training was necessary, including to align them to the vision and to understand what we were trying to do. After showing them the big picture of where the country was heading, the next thing was to really make sure that the work they would be doing would be meaningful to them and to the whole country at large. To really demonstrate to the team that what they were doing has had a transformational effect within the society.

Once the team was in place and being trained, we started hammering it home that the critical thing was delivery. This is still a work in progress. The teams are going through on-the-job training programs, being introduced to new ways of working, and we have started to see the benefits. For instance, in the middle of COVID-19 lockdowns, the teams were stretched too thin, but we managed to support the staff across government to continue to work from home.

As You Started a New Way of Work for the Government, What Methods Have You Used for Steering Agencies in Your Intended Direction?

Continuous engagement and consultation are very important. The enables you to explain the idea to your stakeholders and provides the opportunity to get feedback from them as well.

The second approach that we are exploring is to be piloting some of the projects. This is based on the proof-of-concept (PoC) strategy that we have as a country more widely. The PoC strategy invites entrepreneurs who have good ideas to come and try them out in Rwanda. The focus areas are fintech, medtech, and agritech so far. So, we are working on this idea so that in the same manner we could implement some of the projects in digital government. This will lead to a “show-and-tell” kind of approach, which starts from a small team of our people focusing on trying something out. When they have finished something, they show it to their colleagues and peers. Showing them that this works, how it was done. It is something that we believe will create a bit of buzz in the team and people will like it. We intend to extend it and spread it wide across the entire public sector.

Our objective with this method is to address two things. First, it enables us to start small and then grow widely in capacity by getting people to an understanding of how to do something. Second, it also enables doing incremental improvements in terms of delivery. Even if it fails, the failure is not that big; it is contained.

Sometimes, such piloting has been and can be hard. The challenge is often how to convert a successful pilot into a live service, in cases where we are working with an external partner and the service would need to be contracted. This has led us to look into what we call procurement for innovation. We are working with our national public procurement authority to create an environment that will enable us to go into a pilot mode and then later smoothly transition into a live commercial or a contracted project within the same procurement.

Another approach we have tried to implement, and it is still in its infancy stage, is that we are building a sort of central help desk environment for the public sector. We are trying to set up an internal orchestration team, where every request or every need that comes into RISA is orchestrated to the most appropriate team in RISA to solve it. This will help to demarcate between the “firefighters” and the teams that are focused strategically on one particular item. It will help to use our resources in an efficient manner.

Just very recently the government did a major IT function reorganization that will improve the delivery a lot. The IT teams in sectors have been consolidated into a chief digital office headed by a chief digital officer (CDO) who we help to select and coordinate from RISA. Sectors are the ministerial responsibility areas, such as agriculture with the relevant ministry and its affiliated agencies, education with that ministry and its affiliated agencies, and so on. This new structure will help in terms of pooling resources together, both financial and human. It will also help in terms of exchanging skills across functions and sectors and managing the projects for faster and better delivery.

You Emphasized That You Really Started from Building Up a Team. How Did You Find Suitable People?

Oh, boy! That is the most difficult part of this job. This is even more difficult in the public sector because we cannot compete with the private sector in terms of remuneration.

However, one interesting observation is that we have noticed that people are not necessarily attracted by money. When they get a chance to understand the country's digitization vision and ambitions, they get excited because they are able to see the big picture and the greater impact to the development of Rwanda. This is something that they are excited to come and be part of.

This is how we all were able to attract the good team were at RISA and the ministry, all the new CDOs and business analysts in sectors that have been appointed. The work now is on how to keep on improving their skills and providing them with the required tools.

You Have Mentioned That as You Bring People Onboard, You Do a Lot of Training—How?

The best training is just getting these people jump into the action. Classroom-type of training does not cut it. While they are going through implementation, the necessary concepts are explained, and they carry on with the project. So, as they work through a piece of technology or deliver a project, they take time and see the bigger picture to appreciate it and see the work in the right light.

Another approach is assigning someone a project and asking them to follow it up until completion, with a specific purpose of learning some area or competence—we explain that purpose clearly to them. In these cases, we see that people get really excited and hungry; they put in a lot of effort then, actually. This sort of coaching has been very, very instrumental for us.

One useful thing I have noticed is to get some people to focus vertically. There are those people who will always continue to work across fields. A good network engineer is going to be a network engineer irrespective of the sector in which they operate. But if you are a business analyst, you want them to get the nuts and bolts of a particular business or service. A good business analyst with experience from the health sector might struggle if you take them to the education sector, because the working dynamics are different. That is why they are encouraged to focus. If you are a business analyst or digitization lead, take one or two sectors, but do not take too many.

What Routines Have Been Useful for You as the Manager to Steer RISA's Team and Culture?

I have an open and collaborative style and approach. We use open office approach also for this reason. In the building where we work, I try to take a day then and again to walk around and through all the departments. Talk to all the engineers, all the staff, to encourage them and loosen them up so that they are able to relate and understand. Or to challenge them on what they are working on, creating a cooperation environment.

The idea is that whenever someone in the team faces a challenge, they would not shy from reaching out or approaching you. It has created a bond within the organization.

The other thing is to have a check-in period every now and then. Of course, we have the standard management meetings and executive meetings every other week. Every quarter we have a general staff meeting, when we give the team an update on where we are and where are we going. We try to hammer home the vision, strategy, culture, what we expect from them, and what they should expect from us. This sort of collaborative, open style has helped in getting the organization together and have the team understanding clearly what the leadership would like to see them do.

We have also started going to sports events together, such as football [soccer] matches. We do workshops where we get a team to present a project they are working on or also external workshops together with the industry.

What Routines Have You Employed to Be an Effective Leader?

As a leader of an institution like the one I am heading, you need to keep abreast of what is happening outside your circle of operation. What is happening in the industry at large? What are the global events that are shaping your sector or your industry? If there is new technology coming, how do you prepare yourself to benefit from it, or not to be disrupted by it, and rather ride on the wave?

So, one of the things that I have tried to keep in my schedule is reading and trying to study. This includes trying to talk to colleagues out there on what are they doing and what keeps them busy. How have they overcome the challenges that I might be facing? Of course, getting people's time like that is not an easy feat. It is not that they do not want to share but their sheer volume of activities makes them busy.

I take this as homework: if you do not read, you do not lead! If I do not read and see what is happening, then I will lose track of it and I am not able to lead the organization I lead. Our partners look up to me to have a team that advises them and does it correctly.

What Has Been Effective for Managing the Relationships with Outside Stakeholders?

Again, I like to count myself as lucky to be leading RISA because our country has a leadership whose vision is very clear in terms of transformation. This sets the momentum and agenda for all the activities and ensures collaboration, because our government is very driven by cooperation. The approach in the government is that if there is an institution in charge of a certain area, everybody else follows their lead.

This helps the effort, but you also have to really make it easy for others to respond to what you would want them to respond to. That is why we have been engaging others in government from time to time in sector meetings such as sector working groups, when we present what we are working on.

We need to keep engaging these stakeholders so that they understand where we are coming from, what our responsibilities are, and, most importantly, the value that we can bring into whatever they are doing right now.

We still sometimes argue with the other agencies, mostly about finding the budget to do things, how best to do them. This is good because it enables us to learn.

You Mentioned That You Set Out to Create a Certain Culture from the Start. What Are Your Mottos or Principles That You Have Tried to Install in the Team?

One principle that I am right now trying to tell everybody is to land one plane at a time, because you cannot land two planes at the same time. Just like in an air control operating tower, each controller is landing one plane or taking one plane off the ground at a time, even if there are several planes ready for takeoff and others ready to land. It means that you may have several projects currently at hand but do make sure that at any particular moment you are focusing on one only—making sure that you deliver it and deliver well.

Do less but do it well. The other thing is that do it fast and make sure that it has the impact. If you take on five different things and you do not do any of them well, then it kills the whole thing.

That is why, again, the CDOs are going to be very key for enabling us to deliver more. If we have fifteen of them, one in each ministry and each takes on one thing, then in a year we will have fifteen things delivered. In RISA, if each person in the team takes on one thing, we will have twenty or thirty different activities delivered.

The one thing that I keep on hammering on is the execution. To develop this “killer” instinct of “get something, finish it.”

One thing that has proven to be difficult in this direction, and we have to keep pushing, is how to learn to say no to things that are either not aligned well to what we are trying to achieve or are not going to bring us immediate impact. We need to keep focus on critical aspects and works. That is why we are trying to set up the orchestration team that I mentioned who will receive all the incoming requests and then sift through and direct them to action appropriately. We might be able to easier push the issues that are as we want them to be or not really responding to our critical objectives behind in the queue.

Of course, it is sometimes very difficult to say no to these very high-profile institutions or people because they are coming to ask for help not for the sake of it, but out of a need. The way we try to handle it is to throw it back and ask, “How is it part of your strategy?” That creates a safer way of saying no if it has not been on the table before, when we reviewed things during the planning process. Another option is to steer them and yourself to put it on next year's plan if it truly might become critical.

What Do You Think You Have Achieved in RISA So Far?

One thing that I am really happy to see happening is that RISA as an organization and ICT, in general, have lived up to providing solutions to some of the challenges. A good example is the current COVID-19 situation when every organization has been calling RISA to help do the work to go through the pandemic. It has been really good to see this demonstration that ICT can and indeed does provide a solution.

Second, a good achievement is to have structured the RISA team in a way that we are all interlinked, able to work together and deliver.

Third, now people in different organizations are starting to understand that we cannot just jump into buying a system—you need to first understand what services you are offering. You first need to do business analysis to really understand the need and then go and develop or purchase a system.

You Brought Up That More Requests Came Your Way with COVID-19—How Did This Affect Your Delivery and How Did You Handle Them?

COVID-19 came in and disrupted a lot of our plans, so we had to adjust. We needed to jump quickly, and we rolled out quite a number of services. For example, a majority of government work now can be conducted online, students have been able to continue attending classes, and so on.

We tapped into the tools that were available from previous work to support the fight against the spread of COVID-19. For instance, some of the government agencies were able to use drones that had been piloted to deliver blood and medicines across the country by a local start-up called Zipline, and some other companies. Now, in COVID-19 time these drones were used to fly around different cities and tell people to stay at home, to look for lockdown violations, or the like. Another example was that robots were brought in to facilitate temperature checks or ensure that masks are worn at hospitals.

Have You Had Any Failures or Things That You Regret?

I would not say they are failures, but we have not been able to achieve several projects in the time that we envisaged. For example, we have been working on an enterprise service bus for the last two or three years but do not have it successfully completed as we intended. This is due to some limits we have had in technical and financial resources.

We also wanted to be further ahead with digital skills training for citizens. That has been hampered by COVID-19. We aimed at getting two to three million people trained on digital skills but have not even reached a million.

Sometimes we have had the issue of partnership when service providers have not come across and delivered as expected. We do want to promote the private sector through our work because they are the engine of economic growth. However, now we are trying to structure such collaborations in a way so as to less reinvent the wheel and rather borrow the wheels that have been done somewhere. Also, balance it better with doing some things on our own, in RISA, or in the government.

What Are the Next Challenges for You and for the Digital Government in Rwanda?

Now that we have restructured and reorganized our approach with the CDOs and are working very hard with the leadership of our minister to get the right funding, I believe that the next two or three years are going to be very critical. I view them as another pivotal moment in the digitization journey of our country because we will be laying foundational ground for the next ten or twenty years.

For example, service delivery requires having certain things in place. First, you need to automate the services more—we intend to embark on a massive service digitization campaign for services that are still manual. Second, what good are the digital services if citizens do not know how to use them? That is why digital literacy is going to be a cornerstone of what we will be doing in the next years. Third, even with digital services and skills in place, people need tools to use the services—whether smartphones, tablets, or what have you. Then the next thing is how can services be reached? 4G mobile connectivity is there all over the country, but the coverage in my neighborhood is useless if I am not able to access it in my home or office.

All that said, if we do not have an entrepreneur ecosystem that enables innovation to create different products and services, we will have a handicap to growth. We need to enable entrepreneurs so that they can innovate with different tools and drive the growth of the economy.

Finally, there are lots and lots of emerging technologies. To understand them and to be able to make use of them, we need to create a crowd of experts in these areas. Be it robotics, machine learning, AI, quantum computing, you name it.

So, our challenges at RISA are wider than just digital government, given our mandate. To achieve it all, we need to start speeding up the delivery. CDOs in the ministries will help a lot and ICT can in this way truly become a driving force for economic development of the country through all these different sectors.

What Steps Have You Taken to Make Sure That What You Have Been Starting Will Last?

We have a collaborative approach: we make sure that at least a couple of people are working on something—or anything—together. One person may take the lead and the other or others support in the work. This ensures that there is knowledge sharing and continuity through it.

The other strategy is coaching, of course. We are building a framework where everyone from senior team members coach junior team members and pass their knowledge around.

What Do You Think You Have Learned the Most in This Role?

I wish that someone had told me to put the technology hat aside early and focus on the public services and other aspects, but not technology. I spend more than half of my time on things that are nontechnical. I deal with procurement, with finance, with human resources, with legal. I do all these other things that are actually not at all my core competence.

If someone had told me this before, I would have asked for some time to get some knowledge and a picture of what these things are and how to do them. Right now, it has been a bit like fixing an engine of the plane mid-air. But all in all, it has a been great learning experience for me. Like a great MBA course of sorts!

What Other Skills or Knowledge Is Useful to Do This Sort of Job Well?

People management is key. You need to be really, really good at managing and engaging the team, and also at stakeholder management.

However, it has to be substantiated by the technical know-how. That is because even if you are good at managing stakeholders and engaging your peers, if you are shallow on the substance, it is not going to help. Good people skills can get you in through the door, but not keep you there. You need to at least understand the engineering part, the systems, the solutions while also ensuring that you are good at people and stakeholder management.

The third part would be to learn to understand the mechanics of how public service operates—the business processes. Then you will be able to succeed.

What Would Be Your Three Recommendations to a Colleague on How to Be an Effective Digital Government Leader?

Understand the “currency” of the country, the social capital. Then you will be able to succeed. What gets things moving? What really motivates people? How can you engage that? As I said before, you need to manage your stakeholders down, up, and also horizontally to be successful in digitizing the public sector.

Understand the business, the industry. If you picked me up and put me in the medical field, I would struggle.

In this role, I have come to realize that the private sector partners and solution providers are a double-edged sword. You need to have them on your side, you need to have the good ones because you cannot do everything on your own. However, you need to be ready so that they do not take you for a ride. You need to have your internal skills and capabilities to ask the right questions, to challenge them, so that they deliver what you want them to deliver. In addition, you also need to balance out what you give them and what you do internally. This is a function of the resources within the country, from finances to the technical know-how, available to you.