St. Louis finds budding business partnership in Rwanda

Yahoo

11-02-2025

ST. LOUIS – Mentioning Rwanda rewinds the mind to 1994 and one of the worst genocides in history. Many of the more than 800,000 people killed during the 100-day massacre are remembered inside the Genocide Memorial in Rwanda's capital city of Kigali.
30 years later, reconciling the atrocities that occurred—with a focus on unity and progress—has turned Kigali into one of Africa's fastest-growing economies.
'Some of the things they were doing there were so advanced I couldn't believe it,' founder and partner at St. Louis Nexus Group Rodney Boyd said.
Boyd first traveled to Rwanda 15 months ago. What he experienced laid the groundwork for a return trip in early January with a group of St. Louis business leaders.
'Everyone on the trip, everyone that went from our delegation, was blown away,' he said.
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BioSTL Founding President and CEO Donn Rubin added, 'The way the country itself deploys innovation is in some ways ahead of us.'
Rwanda's business-friendly government has fostered a young, tech-savvy generation of entrepreneurs that would partner perfectly with some of St. Louis' best and brightest, according to Rubin.
'Ultimately, we'd like to see a two-way marketplace of innovation, where we find innovation in those places that we bring to St. Louis to strengthen our health systems, improve our quality of life, help our corporations be more competitive, but also have markets going the other direction, where our innovators and our companies can bring and deploy their innovation,' he said.
Africa's population is expected to nearly double to 2.5 billion people by 2050. Despite being nearly 8,000 miles from here, there's already a small St. Louis footprint in Rwanda.
Fresh Harvest 365, a hydroponic farming company, and the Danforth Plant Science Center are currently working in Rwanda.
'Rwanda and the countries that surround it to make up East Africa are some of the fastest-growing economies by GDP over the next 10 to 20 years,' World Trade Center Executive Director Tim Nowak noted.
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St. Louis and Kigali could soon be sister cities, he added. It would be St. Louis' first new sister city since 2017 and only the second in Africa.
'I want to give a shout-out, if you will, to many here in the African diaspora, in St. Louis, including the African Chamber of Commerce, who have come to the table with us. What they've come together to say is we believe in this. Again, it's not just Rwanda; it is engagement towards larger Africa, and I think that's where we're headed,' Nowak said.
Beyond business, Rodney Boyd believes there's a cultural component St. Louis can gain from this relationship.
'I've called myself African American, but until recently, I didn't put a lot of content in the African part, and I put more on the American part, right? I never thought about it. When I was there, that first trip, there was emotion, you know, I found myself just sort of driving around, looking at all these people and thinking about things I never thought about in terms of my own ancestry. I love the idea that maybe someday, young students from Harris-Stowe or from some of the schools here will go visit this great country, seeing people their own age that they never even thought about, right?' Boyd added.
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