Source: Poverty Cure | Published on September 19, 2013
Lydie Hakizimana of Rwanda describes the effects of corruption on the human spirit. The problem of corruption extends beyond dollars and cents. It crushes the entrepreneurial spirit of a people.
“Corruption leads to a lot of missed opportunities. When you have corruption in a country, people are just discouraged. There is no hope. They don’t see themselves successful in the long term. They just feel that they need to know a minister or the son of the minister to be successful in a country. With hope you can have ideas, with hope you can think of a better future, with hope you can take the risk. But when you see that the government is not putting in place that environment that can help you to have that hope, it’s just useless. When you think of creating a business, when you have the ideas, when you’re trying to put those ideas in papers, when you’re submitting the ideas, and after few days or a few years, you’ve seen there’s some people in the government stealing that idea, it makes you fear. You just fear to take the risk.”
- Lydie Hakizimana is co-founder and Managing Director of Drakkar Limited, a specialist reseller and distributor of educational textbooks. It all started back in 2006 when this avid bookworm decided to follow her passion and opened a small bookshop. Before long, her entrepreneurial instincts had her developing relationships with numerous publishing companies. Eventually, she struck a deal that was to be the making of her company with UK publisher, Pearson Education. Drakkar rapidly evolved into a leading educational textbooks reseller in Rwanda, becoming an important enabler of her country's vision for building a knowledge-based economy. Today, Lydie manages 45 employees and thirty part-time distributors covering the five provinces of Rwanda. Lydie has also added exclusive distributor deals with Longman, Heinemann and Penguin to her Pearson contract.