How ignorance and
stupidity combined to make the UK press hostile to a highly profitable
sponsorship
Last week Rwanda and Arsenal, an English Premier League
football club, signed a $40m sponsorship deal for three years. According to the
deal, a “Visit Rwanda” logo will be emblazoned on the left sleeve of all first
team, Under-23 and Arsenal Women’s shirts beginning with the new season this
summer. Many people were impressed because the country is selling itself as
product and branding itself like a private enterprise.
However, sections of the British press have been denouncing
the deal. They claim President Paul Kagame (who supports Arsenal) spent $40m on
“his club” – as if the money is a gift to Arsenal without any quid pro quo. The
British government gives Rwanda $85m annually in foreign aid. So this deal
became part the policy debate on aid: why should a country that spends $40m on
sponsoring an English football club continue to receive British aid.
A section in the regional talking heads on social media
argued that Rwanda is “wasting” $40m sponsoring a rich English football club
when its citizens are poor. It is true Rwanda is still a very poor country. It
has one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world – sitting on the bottom
20 countries. Over 30% of its population live in poverty. But is spending $40m
to advertise itself on a T-shirt of a major European football club a waste of
money?
Let’s look at the facts. Rwanda wants to promote itself
globally as a tourist destination. How do you attract customers to your product
or visitors to your country? The first step is to create top of mind awareness
about your existence among targeted segments of the global population.
Now the Arsenal T-shirt is seen 35 million times per day
around the world. Arsenal has the largest fan base of any English football club
on the African continent. It has an even larger fan base around the world.
Thus, placing “Visit Rwanda” on the sleeves of its T-shirts gives the country a
lot of visibility and has great potential to entice many people to visit the
country.
Why does Rwanda need more and more tourists visiting it? In
2017 it got 1.5 million visitors and earned $400m from tourism. Holding many
factors constant, we can project that the deal with Arsenal will triple these
visitors in three years. That will give Rwanda 4.5 million visitors and revenues
from tourism worth $1.2 billion. Surely investing $40 million to earn an extra
$800 million is one of the highest rates of return on investment anyone can get
anywhere in the world. Even if we cut this by 50% it still remains a high rate
of return.
Secondly, increasing tourist visitors has a direct impact on
the incomes of the poor, whom sections of the British press claim are
disadvantaged by this deal. As early as 2007 when Rwanda adopted the policy of
targeting high end tourists, the Overseas Development Institute and SNV did a
study on the impact of tourism on the incomes of the poor.
The study looked at where the poor participate in tourism
and tried to estimate the cash flowing to them. They found that an influx of
17,000 upmarket tourists generates $1.5 million as income for poor households
in Kigali – that is to say the semi-skilled and unskilled workers, food
producers and artisans.
The people who work in hotels where touristsstay as waiters
and waitresses, cleaners, cooks, bartenders, front desk etc. are beneficiaries
of the tourism industry because their incomes are generated by tourism. Farmers
whose food produce is purchased by hotels are among the poor.
This is not to mention the crafts industry that sells its
products to tourists and even donations tourists make. Rwanda needs to earn
foreign exchange to import many of the things it needs and currently tourism is
the largest foreign exchange earner. So what is wrong with the country
investing $40 million in an activity best positioned to promote it as a tourist
destination?
I do not like ad hominem debates, and I dislike arguments
that pit Africa against the “racist West.” But I find it difficult to believe
that anyone of the critics in the British press would fail to see the value of
Rwanda’s investment in this sponsorship of Arsenal. If the benefits are this
obvious, what really could have led sections of the British media and some
politicians in continental Europe to denounce the deal if it is not racism
combined with individual ignorance and stupidity?
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