1.45pm (Rwanda), 12.45pm (UK): The first official stop on David Cameron's visit to Rwanda was to a textile factory in Kigali.
Photograph: Andrew Parsons/PA Wire.
"Hello, I've seen you on the telly," said Raj Rajendran, the Managing Director of Utexrwa.
The company has been going since 1985, quite unsurprisingly was on the rocks in and immediately after the genocide of 1994, but, helped by government intervention in 1999, when the Rwandan Ministry of Defence agreed an order to supply military uniforms, the firm is now thriving.
It has an annual turnover of $7m, 95% of which comes from Rwanda itself.
Mr Cameron toured the factory, looking at silkworms being bred, sewing machines being worked, and fabrics being cut. Cue jokes about Mr Cameron failing to end the era of spin, and turning on the worms in his own party.
Earlier, during a press conference at the guest house where he will be staying this evening, Mr Cameron deadbatted questions about Sunday newspaper stories indicating disquiet in the Tory ranks about his leadership.
"It's a non-story," he said several times about a piece in the Telegraph.
Previewing the report issued by the party's Globalisation and Global Poverty Policy Group, Mr Cameron said he wanted the EU to pull down trade barriers and tariffs to developing countries.
The MD of the textile factory illustrated his point, saying that the firm was charged 6.9% duty on silk exports to the UK.
During the press conference Mr Cameron told us his first experience of sub-Saharan Africa was on a visit to Kenya in 1985.
Nothing, he said, could ever prepare you for or make you ever forget that first experience of seeing real, desperate poverty at first hand.
He admitted that he had thought about whether he could leave Britain at a time when parts of the country, including his own Witney constituency, are swamped in flood water.
But he calculated that his two-day visit here, long arranged and effectively in preparation for a year, was too important and too valuable to cancel and that doing so would have meant letting an awful lot of people down.
He probably made the right choice; imagine the alternative headlines if he appeared to panic about presentation and turn his back on the international development agenda that the Tories are desperate to win from, or at least share with, Labour.
