It’s hard to imagine a national lottery in Europe operating without the seemingly essential requirements of a nationwide cabled telecoms infrastructure and near 100% penetration of TV into homes. After all, retail ticket sale terminals need to connect to central servers in an instant via the phone network; ticket holders watch the live draw as part of weekly or twice-weekly TV shows; and those who miss the live draw typically check later online or on teletext to see if their numbers have come up.

A challenging landscape
In Rwanda, however, the technical and social landscape is somewhat different. Despite continuing investment in telecoms, Rwanda is still a long way from having a cabled infrastructure across the entire country. Then there’s the matter of television coverage: currently, only around 2% of households in Rwanda have a TV.
“Given the challenges we faced, it has been an incredible team effort to get from award of contract to launch in just under 18 months,” says Philip Brizoua, Director General of Lotto Rwanda.
So how did Lotto Rwanda make the transition from dream to reality in such a short space of time? Mark Hutchinson, head of Octavian’s specialist lottery division OctaLotto, takes up the story. “Any successful lottery launch requires an extremely close working relationship between the various organisations involved”, says Hutchinson. “In terms of the core operations, the main organisations involved were Tilia Games, who were to operate the national lottery for Lotto Rwanda; Rwandatel, the leading telecommunications provider in Rwanda; and Octavian.”

The starting point
In July 2007 Tilia Games was awarded the exclusive licence to operate a national lottery and place gaming machines in Rwanda. Aware of Octavian’s successful implementation of systems and its acquired, wholly owned subsidiary GSI’s track record in successful lottery start-ups and operations around the world, in June 2008 Tilia brought in Octavian. Detailed discussions then began in earnest on exactly how Lotto Rwanda would operate, both technically and culturally.
Octavian put a team of systems and lottery start-up experts to work on the project and quickly came up with an outline systems solution that would provide the technical backbone. After further extensive discussions, it was agreed that Octavian would provide not only the actual systems for Tilia to operate Lotto Rwanda but also a complete start-up and ongoing marketing solution.

The need for partnership
Tilia Games has extensive general gaming experience in Africa, but needed to partner with a lottery specialist. “Three things in particular convinced us that Octavian was the right partner to work alongside for this complex launch,” says Alan Hollway, Tilia’s Chief Operating Officer. “Firstly, their OctaLotto team has unrivalled experience in the lottery world – not just involvement in the UK and US, but in smaller, developing countries too. Secondly, they had a proven end-to-end lottery and gaming management system that was immensely scalable and could easily be customised to suit the specific technical requirements in Rwanda, including the need to operate much of the retail ticket sales operation using wireless technology. And thirdly, Octavian was able to deliver a complete turnkey start-up solution, including the all-important marketing element.”

A scalable system and strong connections
The scalability and robustness of the Octavian system, a development of the company’s Symphony LE (Lottery Edition) system, was an important consideration. Rwanda has a population of around 10 million today, but the Octavian system is capable of handling ticket sales to more than 400 million people, so there’s considerable power in reserve, should it be needed.
Octavian was also able to provide the right connections in other areas. As part of its remit, the OctaLotto team is responsible for providing an
end-to-end marketing solution for the launch and operation of Lotto Rwanda. This includes both a weekly radio show and a television show, both produced in partnership with Jonathan Goodson Productions, the world’s premier lottery game show producers.
Similarly, Tilia has been able to tap into Octavian’s extensive supplies network when sourcing everything from the wireless POS terminals that sell the majority of the Lotto Rwanda tickets, to the ball blower that randomly selects the winning numbers.

A clear start-up plan
“Central to the working relationship throughout has been a clear start-up plan and a concise systems specification,” explains Octavian’s Hutchinson. “By providing deep expertise and practical experience in these areas Octavian has been able to kick-start the whole project, collapse timescales and keep all parties on track. Our extensive contacts across the lottery world have also helped us to specify the correct components and speed up the overall delivery. An example of this is the use of intelligent wireless tickets sales terminals from G-Lot, a leading software company involved in the China Welfare and Sports Lottery. These mobile handheld terminals allow people to purchase lottery tickets – and also to purchase top-ups for their mobile phones – in the many areas of Rwanda not served by cabled infrastructure.

Up and running
The concerted team effort culminated in the launch of a promotional campaign on October 25th 2008, in the lead-up to the launch of the main Lotto Rwanda game.
To boost awareness, a national radio game show capable of reaching around 98% of the population is now broadcast on Radio Rwanda every Saturday night between 8.45 and 9:15pm. The first show was a talk show during which Philip Brizoua of Lotto Rwanda and Mark Hutchinson of Octavian, amongst others, discussed how the lottery would contribute to the development of Rwanda. The second show was hosted by Rwanda’s Minister for Sports and Culture, Joseph Habineza. He acted as guest DJ and was joined by players from the Rwanda national football team. This was such a success that Habineza, a highly popular figure in Rwanda, returned to host week three’s show.

Involving the nation
It was in week two’s show that the first promotional competition was launched, with a top prize of one million Rwandese francs and a cow. Livestock plays a very important role in Rwandan life and a cow is seen as a significant and enviable reward. More than 90% of the people in Rwanda earn a living from agriculture and measure their wealth in terms of the numbers of goats and cows they own.
The winner of the one million Rwandese francs and cow was presented with their prize by Joseph Habineza at half-time during the Rwanda v Togo football match. Further promotions followed in the lead-up to the launch of the live draw. These included a chance for a lucky winner to have dinner with the recording artist Shaggy (of “Oh Carolina” and “Boombastic” fame) and to attend his concert at the sports stadium as a VIP guest. All of these raised national awareness in the lead-up to the first Lotto Rwanda live draw, which launched on Saturday December 20th. The launch of the main Lotto Rwanda 6-of-36 weekly game saw the prize value rise to a minimum of 30 million Rwandese francs.

Technically advanced and with huge capacity
Initially, ticket sales for the live draw will be via 300 of the wireless G-Lot terminals connecting to the network via GPRS. However, as mentioned earlier, there’s huge amount of headroom built-in to allow for growth. “As the system is configured right now, there’s the capacity to connect 3,000 terminals to the network” says Graham Yates, Chief Technology Officer at Octavian. “However, the system is built to scale up very easily. As operations expand, we can scale up the number of tickets sales terminals and outlets connecting to the network and, of course, the database and server capacity. The system as it stands today is capable of processing 3.6 billion transactions a year. But again, as demand increases, the Transaction Processing Cluster and software has been developed to easily scale up and handle many, many millions of transactions every week.”

Entertainment, education, development
Although ownership of televisions is limited in Rwanda, a TV chat show also began in December, again created in partnership with Jonathan Goodson Productions. The purpose of this is not only to entertain but also to educate and reassure people about issues such as the equal-odds-for-all, security and the opportunities for development offered by Rwanda’s new national lottery.
According to Philip Brizoua, “A great spirit of co-operation, shared goals and optimism has been generated amongst the team behind Lotto Rwanda. We now have a world-class lottery operation, equal to or better than any operating around the globe today. It offers a true ‘win-win’, providing players with a chance to win a minimum of 30 million Rwandese francs while also generating money for the good causes it supports in areas such as sports, arts, culture, education, and other community development needs.”

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