Rwanda is in talks with a host of nations to help develop its space capabilities, in possible deals that will potentially add impetus to the country’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) ambitions.

The country’s space ambitions have attracted interest from countries such as Japan, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates,  Paula Ingabire, the Minister of ICT and Innovations, told The New Times.

The proposed mid to long-term partnerships with these countries, she said, range from the use of geospatial data, to the design, and manufacturing of satellites.

Rwanda and Israel signed an agreement in 2020, effectively laying the grounds for pursuing this cooperation. And in 2019, Rwanda and Japan teamed up to build the first cube satellite (RwaSat-1) which was launched from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Centre and deployed to the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) from International Space Station.

RwaSat-1 has antennas alongside two multi-spectral cameras on-board which communicate with deployed ground sensors. The satellite helps the government to monitor water resources, natural disasters, agriculture and meteorology.

Under the partnership with Japan, Ingabire disclosed that currently 20 Rwandans are being trained in the design and production of mini satellites.

"The very immediate focus is how we build our own capacity; engineering capacity, analytics, using satellite data and imagery to help us with any analytics we are doing, whether it’s for agricultural productivity, healthcare delivery, disaster management, mining, and so on,” she stated.

The partnerships are backed by the government of Rwanda funding, she noted.

These are some of the latest in a series of initiatives that the country has launched to bolster the contribution of the ICT and innovation sector to the gross domestic product (GDP).

With the newly created space agency, many efforts have been invested in capacity building in light of the country’s space ambition.

In October 2021, Rwanda Space Agency filed a request to acquire two satellite constellations from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), namely Cinnamon-217 and Cinnamon-937.

Ingabire said the actually the number had increased to seven of them and that a beta launch is scheduled in May this year while the full launch of the satellite constellations is expected by the end of 2023.

A satellite constellation is a group of satellites working together as a system. Unlike a single satellite, a constellation can provide permanent global or near-global coverage.