Carnegie Mellon University and the government of Rwanda have signed a memorandum of understanding to explore the possibility of setting up a "center of excellence" in Rwanda.

If the institution proceeds as imagined, it would offer graduate degrees in engineering and information communication technologies and would be financed entirely by the Rwandan government or by a development agency.

"It's all up in the air," said Pradeep Khosla, dean of the college of engineering. "The important part is that they have identified CMU as the place that they want to have build them a center of excellence."

Within the next 30 days, Carnegie Mellon will send Rwanda a memo articulating its vision of what the center of excellence would look like, said Dr. Khosla, and the institution would not open until 2010 at the earliest.

The program would likely be on the scale of Carnegie Mellon institutes in Greece and Portugal, said Dr. Khosla, and would be smaller than its campus in Qatar.

The attraction for Carnegie Mellon, in Dr. Khosla's opinion, is the opportunity to get involved with a country that is completely rebuilding itself after civil war and genocide in the 1990s.

"Rwanda has no natural resources so IT is their main strategy for economic development," he said. "We would play a very influential role in training their next generation of leaders."