Paul Kagame, in many ways, represents the hopes of Africa. He’s a strong but soft-spoken leader who has a radical approach to reconciling the people of his country. He’s willing to take help from richer nations, but insists on independence (“Nobody owns us,” he says) and hopes for a day when Rwanda will no longer be dependent on foreign aid. Hooked to the 15-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, Kagame appeared on Fareed Zakaria’s public affairs show on CNN yesterday (http://tinyurl.com/ney6mn).>

--You’ve been called the entrepreneur president. Why do you believe that entrepreneurship is so important to Rwanda and other African nations?

Kagame: Entrepreneurship is important to Rwanda and other Africa nations especially because in broad terms it unlocks the energies and innovations of people. And through these efforts they’re able to do things that benefit them. They feel that’s more effective than being dependent, as has been the case for so many years. So my job in Rwanda has been to encourage Rwandans to understand their opportunities and to be sure that these opportunities are being made clear to them. We facilitate these opportunities to be availed to them so they can invest in their hard work in different activities that will make them feel empowered. They’re able to work for their living rather than to wait for somebody to do the work for them. It takes time. There’s an issue of changing the attitude, the mindset. The Rwandese have been made to see themselves as poor and dependent on people who will provide for them. If they’re sick, somebody will show up with medicine. If they’re hungry, somebody will show up for food for them. This has been very crippling.

--So the aid culture has really been crippling to your society?

Kagame: That’s the way I see it. Both those who gave aid in the past and those who have been receiving it haven’t seen this as limited in time. They thought it was a relationship that would go on forever. From experience, what we have seen, we have tried to separate from the past. We have seen this.

--This is one of your core principles. Broaden a bit. What are your several core principles in leading the change in economic development in Rwanda?

Kagame: It’s all based on, one, making people understand that they do have within themselves what it takes to enable them to uplift themselves. The other thing is doing it in a dignified way. If we started by having the people waiting for others to come and feed them, that relationship is not correct and is not good for any nation. Hard work. And people understanding they need to do for themselves. In fact, what we have found out in recent times is some of the problems are solvable. We’re raising questions, for example, I’ve been asking my own people whether they understand that in terms of aid the money that comes to them is actually money from taxes paid by citizens of other countries. I keep asking why they feel somebody from another country should be paying a tax to feed these people. Why can’t they themselves raise their own level to that of other countries? They have come to feel they owe them a living. We have to destroy that. And we destroy that by demonstrating that it’s not correct. It’s not in the bible for the Christians, or in whatever book, that there are people in this world who should provide things and others who should depend on them. We have to work hard and raise ourselves.

--Is that a result of colonialism--that people feel they were taken advantage of in the past and now deserve some payback?

Kagame: Colonialism has created a lot of negative effects. Before colonialism you learn in history that many things happened in Africa and other poor places, there were advances, in some cases scientific. But over time the colonialists came and they abandoned all of that. They embraced not only what was brought by the colonialists, but expected the colonialists to keep supplying them. Over time, this dependency and the mentality of dependency developed. Then, over time, and in recent days, we have developed non-government organizations who move into place. They are providers for everything the people need and have not encouraged the people themselves to be able to advance their own programs. They want to always be there and to take care of them. As you look, it is much easier for people to get used to have their programs served by others than to resolve their own problems. It’s human nature. If you get somebody used to the idea that they don’t have to work very hard, that somebody else will come and do for them, they tend to sit back and do nothing.

More than 40,000 US companies claim to be mission driven—meaning they count contributing to social and/or environmental progress among their core values. But how do you know when they’re sincere and when they’re simply mouthing platitudes to score marketing points? B Lab, a non-profit started two years ago by a trio of former Stanford roommates, has come up with a rating and certification system that can sort out the true believers from the pretenders. The outfits that pass the test can call themselves B Corporations. (B is for benefit, as in social benefit)

When Andrew Kassoy, Jay Coen Gilbert, and Bart Houlahan started B Lab two years ago after two decades years in the business world, they initially planned to create an investment fund that would be the Berkshire Hathaway of the sustainable business realm. But quickly they discovered that they—and the social investment community—needed a rating system to decide if a company deserves to be called sustainable. So they ended up deciding to create a non-profit organization whose primary goal would be to creating such a system. “Instead of everybody coming in and trying to reinvent the wheel, it makes sense for this data to be shared and benchmarked,” Kassoy told me when we met earlier today.

Two years later, they have the system in place, called the B Ratings System, and have qualified more than 200 companies as B Corporations.

Obviously, they still have a long way to go to sign up the majority of the companies that claim to be mission driven. While the slow but steady sign-up process proceeds, Kassoy and his colleagues are shifting some of their attention to initiatives they thought would come later in the organization’s arc: creating a rating system for social investments based on the B Ratings System and pushing changes in state laws to create a legal foundation for social businesses. The B Lab folks plan on unveiling their rating system project officially at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York in the fall.

For you socially progressive billionaires out there, they need $4 to $5 million to get it going. So, pony up!

Three days ago, we at Businessweek got the kind of news we had long expected and dreaded: The magazine has been put up for sale by corporate parent McGraw-Hill. BusinessWeek was born in the tumult of 1929 and rose to be the most successful and influential business magazine for many decades. Its downward slide began in 2001 with the dot-com bust, continued during the economic turnaround as Web advertising became more attractive to corporations than print advertising, and accelerated with the coming of the Great Recession. There may be a way to fix BusinessWeek, but it will involve radical surgery.

In my view, this failure of BusinessWeek as a business is yet another sign of a trend that is profoundly disturbing to journalists and should be profoundly disturbing to others. The Internet, that marvelous invention, has killed the traditional business models that supported serious, in-depth journalism. Hopefully, eventually, new models will emerge that will support this very important but also very expensive work. In the meantime, democracy and the integrity of the economic system are threatened. Look at all the crap that the world's businesspeople got away with during the past few years, at a time when we had a fairly aggressive financial press. Now imagine the shenanigans they'll be able to pull in the future if financial journalism is reduced to quick news bits that feed the market frenzy.

While citizen journalism can help, it can't replace real journalism, which is the search for truth by professionals.

BusinessWeek's fate, apparently, will be known by early in the fourth quarter. Hopefully, whether its sold or not, something radically smart will be done to transform the magazine. Beleaguered as it is, BusinessWeek can still be turned around--and, if so, it could light a path for the rest of the journalism crowd to follow.

Here are some tactical changes suggested by my colleague, Steve Baker. http://thenumerati.net/