Rwanda has been transformed from a country ruined by a genocide into a regional “policeman” for African states. Now, the East African country has the ambitious goal of elevating itself to a high-income nation, including ventures into the space sector, according to Rawanda’s U.S. ambassador, Mathilde Mukantabana. 

Speaking to National Security News at the Meridian Space Diplomacy Forum in Washington, Ambassador Makuntabana said the development of the country’s space programme is part of a bigger vision of rebuilding the nation after the genocide 30 years ago.  

From the northern parts of Africa to the south, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda is flexing the country’s military muscle and is transforming the continent’s security landscape.  Rwanda is embroiled in other country’s security dilemmas, fighting Islamist extreme groups from Benin to Mozambique, and Kagame’s troops have been deployed in numerous peace keeping missions around Africa.  

According to figures from Foreign Policy magazine, Rwanda is the fifth-largest contributor to United Nations missions globally and the second largest continental contributor according to the French Institute of International Relations. 

This year Rwanda celebrated thirty years after the genocide. Ambassador Mukantabana said the genocide against the Tutsis shook the country to the core and reduced it to ashes. 

“People have written off Rwanda as dead,” she said. “They were saying in the best of circumstances you could be under the protectorate of the UN forever. 

“You are thinking about a million people dead within three months…. in a hundred days, you are talking about more than three million people living in the country and all the people were affected by what happened, because it was almost like an intimate type of violence. People knew who were killing them.”

What kept Rwanda from dying, she said, was Rwandans taking a stand to unite no matter what. Reliance, good governance, and leadership helped the country to emerge from tragedy, says the ambassador. 

Rwanda is thinking big, she said and part of its plans for economic development is building up a space sector.  

“We are thinking big because space is playing a key role in many different programmes, whether it’s in our agriculture, whether it’s in weather-related type of incidents, whether it’s in education. So, it’s a part of a bigger picture.”

The Rwandan Space Agency was established in 2020 to develop the country’s space sector. The Agency is currently focusing on revolutionising agriculture and to help environmental monitoring, infrastructure development, and disaster management.  

Rwanda was the first African country who signed the Artemis Accords, a series of bilateral agreements on cooperation in outer space, particularly on the moon. 

Mukantabana said space cannot be developed in a vacuum or by a single entity. She believed that space is “where the solidarity of humankind can happen.” Rwanda has partnered with Poland and the United Arab Emirates to collaborate on space initiatives.  She believes that space was not a place for bickering and believes there should be principles that govern partnerships in space. 

“An emerging nation can’t go alone in space,” she said, “when the United States was starting in space in the 1960s, they had to build on what Russia had already established.”

Rwanda has a vision to become a high-income country and space, according to Mukantabana, is part of the bigger picture in achieving that.