About three weeks ago, I sat in a conference hall in San Francisco and listened as President Paul Kagame of Rwanda addressed a group of African and US Government officials. Nothing particularly remarkable in that. Its part of the role of head of state, after all.

However, the location was more than symbolic. The event was at the Hilton, in the Financial District, in tech-rich northern California. And the audience was chock full of luminaries of the IT world, from Cisco, Oracle, Motorola, Microsoft and others. What is even more remarkable is that nearly everyone in the audience agreed.

They agreed on the power of IT to transform the continent, and on its ability to help countries “skip steps in development” by adding more dynamism to local business. Kagame himself referred cell phones as the “lifeline of microentrepreneurs”.