When in two weeks’ time a delegation from IATA will be in Kigali to formally present RwandAir with their IOSA Certificate, which catapulted the airline into the global elite of safety audited airlines, guests from near and far will see a lot more than just the airline’s headquarters and operations. They will also see the “new” Kigali International Airport.
Rwanda may be a geographically smaller country, but it certainly has taken its place on the world scene and is by the general evaluation of many, using a pugilist term, punching well above its weight, and rightly so.
The Rwandan government has identified aviation as a key to economic success, being a landlocked country twice removed from the nearest deep sea ocean port of Mombasa, through which most of the imports and exports are routed. Tourism is the biggest foreign exchange earner and has been for several years, outpacing agriculture, the mining and the service industry, as Rwanda has also established itself as a regional ICT hub.
RwandAir and the Rwanda Civil Aviation Authority, both fall under the same home ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, and while clearly functioning independently of each other, as the regulator and the regulated should be, is a greater force at work here, superimposing national goals
