Effective January 2016, Rwanda will be a full member of World Rugby. With full membership, it means the country will access privileges given to other full member countries.
Effective January 2016, Rwanda will be a full member of World Rugby. With full membership, it means the country will access privileges given to other full member countries.
But there's a long criteria that a very member country, including Rwanda, has to fulfill to retain the membership which is subject to a review every after 24 months.
The federation has been surviving on basic help from the Ministry of Sports and Culture (MINISPOC), the Rwanda National Olympics Sports Committee (RNOSC), Africa Rugby, UK-based NGO Friends of Rwandan Rugby (FoRR), and well wishers.
Therefore, getting full membership, though still under probation, is a timely shot in the arm of the Rwanda Rugby Federation (RRF).
The Federation president, Alex Araire, says the immediate objective is to get the federation technical staff to swing into full action.
According to Araire, RRF will appoint a full-time Technical Director and Chief Executive Officer, who will have a monthly salary unlike in previous years when they simply volunteered.
With full membership, RRF technical people get to participate in World Rugby-organised seminars, trainings and workshops, which will subsequently benefit the players and staff in both the national teams, league clubs and schools.
"Getting full membership motivates us to identity our best talents which will represent us in World Rugby competitions,” Araire told Times Sport in an exclusive interview last week.
Araire pointed out that, another objective high on the RRF to-do list is having all the eight league clubs to achieve their goals.
"The first one is participation, if we have a more robust playing calendar, we get to grow our numbers, participate in more tournaments and improve the quality of our players. This is key because we are going to meet bigger rugby playing nations, which have been there for a while,” he added.
The 2015/2016 season is scheduled to kick-off on December 12. Rwanda is in the Africa Rugby Division 2 South-East tier alongside the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Congo and Burundi whom they meet annually in the Division 2 Cup.
With full membership comes the chance of advancing from this tier to the Division 1 C tier if the Rwanda national team, Silverbacks, win the 2015 tournament. Countries in the Division 1 C tier include; Cameroon, Morocco, Nigeria and Zambia.