The National Post Office, famously known as Iposita locally, will now leverage its foothold in the market to deliver essential products to people in the City of Kigali, most of whom are locked down at home.

Iposita is an established logistics company, specialising in providing postal services.

Patrick Safari, the Director of Commercial Unit, told The New Times that the home delivery service launched this week is part of response mechanism to the novel coronavirus outbreak.

"It is in response to the coronavirus which has devastated the lives of many people, because of the lockdown measures being implemented,” he said.

Iposita is now providing all its motorcycle couriers and all their cars and trucks, to deliver food and medicine orders and shipments of any size from local pharmacies and supermarkets to people at homes. 

"The service is relevant because public transport services like motorcycles and vehicles are no longer operational,” he noted.

The Prime Minister’s Office recently announced a two-week lockdown in a bid to stem the spread of coronavirus, banning unnecessary movement of residents across the country, except for essential services.

On Saturday, March 28, it will be exactly one week of the lockdown, something that has seen more people resort to virtual shopping.

Iposita, which has been operating in Rwanda since 1922, sees the new service as humanitarian assistance to help people get food, medicine and other essential services delivered to them at an affordable rate.

"We understand that people need food and medicine in this period. This is why we took that initiative,” Safari said.

Iposita has started to collaborate with businesses who may want to deliver services to people but with limited logistical muscle to do, but it also enables individuals to directly order products directly.

At the same time, this is an opportunity for the Iposita whose courier services have been halted by the spread of COVID-19.

Like many postal services across the world, Iposita has stopped its mail delivery service as airline services have been suspended and countries imposed travel bans.

The Universal Postal Union (UPU), which monitors international postal exchanges in real-time, recorded a 10 per cent drop in tonnage and a 15 percent drop in the number of postal items on the previous year during the period January 23 to March 23, 2020.

The decrease in volume amounts to at least 10,000 tons, UPU said on Wednesday.

Postal items weighing less than 2 kg saw the most significant drop, with a 13 percent decrease in tonnage and a 16 percent decrease in the number of items sent.