Tourism is slowly reawakening in Rwanda, with a renewed focus on the local market.



It’s a quiet, warm afternoon in June at Rwanda’s iconic, otherwise busy Kigali Convention Center (KCC). The conference venue’s paved parking lot that’s normally teeming with cars, is grey and empty against the backdrop of the green hills. Inside the KCC’s domed facility are 18 venues that can host more than 5,000 delegates at any given time. All of them are painfully silent, just like the five-star Radisson Blu hotel next to it.



This is the first time it has been as quiet since its opening in 2016. The KCC resumed operations on July 1 after the easing of lockdown restrictions, but overall, the MICE (meetings, incentives, conferencing and exhibitions) industry in Rwanda was to host close to 147 events this year targeting a revenue of $88 million. Most of these have been postponed or canceled. The highly-anticipated 26th Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, for instance, originally scheduled for June 22-27 and that would have brought together more than a thousand business and government leaders from The Commonwealth to Kigali, has been postponed to June next year.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



Five kilometers from the KCC, commercial passenger services at the Kigali International Airport that had been suspended are now slowly resuming, with national airline RwandAir announcing flights to select African routes and Dubai from August 1.



Rwanda recorded its first case of Covid-19 in mid-March and was one of the first few African countries to impose a strict and complete lockdown. As everywhere else, this has spelt bad news for the country’s leisure and business tourism sectors.&nbsp;



Take Ntende Hotel, a two-star facility owned by a 3,700-member cooperative of rice farmers called Coproriz. The cooperative’s members collected money to build the facility in Gatsibo district in the country’s Eastern Province in 2018. The hotel’s proximity to the Akagera National Park made it a big drawcard and all was well until Covid-19 changed everything.&nbsp;



James Karangwa, the hotel’s Investment Department Manager, explains that the outbreak resulted in the hotel suspending operations but it continued paying contracted staff and other fixed expenses. An even heavier burden was the repayment of a bank loan. A disheartened Karangwa says: “Having to meet such obligations whilst inoperative has affected us a great deal.”



Karangwa explains that, thankfully, the negative impact on the hotel business was cushioned by the group’s agri-business which was relatively less affected in the pandemic.



“The consequences would have been disastrous if we had not diversified our portfolio by investing in the cultivation of rice, maize and soya.”



The tourism and hospitality operators had been enduring the pain of Covid-19 since January, when the news about the virus first broke globally.



“There were already fears over the virus in January and many travelers cancelled their bookings while those that were here rushed back home to avoid being stuck,” recalls Wilson Habimana, founder of Wilson Tours and Travel Agency Ltd in Kigali. Of the 16 people his company employed before the outbreak, only four remain now.



“We have had a lot of cancellations from clients while others want their money back, hence, we had to do refund both for tours and tickets, which hasn’t been easy, as this pandemic caught the world unawares and it’s like most of the clients have lost the hope of traveling because of fear,” says Buwule Anna Fridah, a tour consultant, to FORBES AFRICA.



“As workers in the tourism industry, we have been affected by this pandemic because the source of our income has been closed,” concurs Ismael Nsengiyumva, a driver-guide, adding that investing in sectors other than tourism is one of the lessons he has learned from the crisis.



The pandemic has especially been a burden for new facilities such as the Epic Hotel &amp; Suites in Nyagatare district, in the Eastern Province of Rwanda. The four-star property opened in 2018; today, most of its workers have been sent home as the pandemic rendered them redundant.



“Since the lockdown, we certainly got affected; as most hotels, we had to lay off a large number of our workers. We came up with a policy to maintain the hotel in a semi-functional state because closing it would cost us a lot more [than] to restart,” says the chairman of its board, Alfred Ndabarasa. However, he expresses the hope of a recovery.



“The reopening of tourism and hospitality activities is helpful and we are gradually bringing our staff to work. Hopefully, by September, a big number would have returned to work if this problem does not persist.”



On June 16, a cabinet resolution that shone a glimmer of hope for the tourism and hospitality industry was released. “Domestic tourism and international tourism for visitors traveling [on] charter flights will resume,” read part of the statement. The government encouraged hotels to participate in domestic tourism promotion and offer conference services while adhering to strict health guidelines.&nbsp;



Earlier in the month, the government had launched a two-year fund for businesses affected by Covid-19. Dubbed the Economic Recovery Fund (ERF), it is to mobilize $200 million and designed to support enterprises highly impacted by the crisis so they can survive, restart work and safeguard employment.



An initial $100 million was allocated to the hotels sector loan refinancing as the cancellations of events and bookings due to the global lockdown and travel restrictions brought the sector to its knees, leading to a loss of over 90% of revenue.



Nsengiyumva Barakabuye, Chairman of the Rwanda Hospitality Association, commends the collaboration between the association and the government in responding to the crisis.



“We joined hands with the government in combating the pandemic through raising awareness to our members about Covid-19 and the measures to prevent its propagation,” he says.



“We requested for a tax waiver and economic stimulus. So far, so good. Although not all we requested was granted, the PAYE (Pay as You Earn) was waived for four months and a post Covid-19 Recovery Fund was put in place by the government.”



While the slow reopening of the tourism and hospitality sector has brought relief, Barakabuye says it’s yet to pick up. “Tourism activities have just been reopened. Borders are still closed and we are yet to start as members are preparing for the domestic market.”



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="800" height="600" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Nyungwe-Canopy-Walkway-in-the-evening.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-47081" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Nyungwe-Canopy-Walkway-in-the-evening.jpg 800w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Nyungwe-Canopy-Walkway-in-the-evening-300x225.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Nyungwe-Canopy-Walkway-in-the-evening-600x450.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Nyungwe-Canopy-Walkway-in-the-evening-768x576.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /><figcaption>The Nyungwe Canopy Walkway in the evening</figcaption></figure>



New opportunities in a crisis



Twentyfive-year-old Nostalgie Patrice studied software engineering in China and the United States. When he graduated in 2018, he wasn’t just nostalgic about his home country, he was also enthusiastic and prepared to use his newfound skills to seek opportunities in it. In March last year, he founded DTravela, a platform that aims to promote tourism and hospitality products digitally.



“I started DTravela after seeing how Rwanda was highly promoted as a tourism destination, and identified a business opportunity in unlocking its accessibility,” says Patrice.



But now, sales has suffered. “Covid-19 has strongly affected us because our clients are not operating. From March to June, we had almost zero sales,” he rues.



Going through this troublesome phase has been an uphill task. And like many others, he pivoted his business.&nbsp;



He revisited his idea of offering virtual tours, which had been disregarded by the many he had originally pitched it to. “When I took the proposal to different stakeholders prior to the pandemic, they could not understand its significance,” he says.



This time around, it was welcomed and supported. He makes a strong case for virtual tourism, which he considers an unexplored route to attracting tourists.



“We do teasers and that helps raise awareness about a place or product. By showcasing products and profiling people, we are able to attract tourists because research has shown that 80% of them do online searches before visiting,” says Patrice.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Last year, travel blog, Travel Lemming, voted Rwanda one of the top 30 emerging travel destinations worldwide for 2020 and the first in Africa. In addition to tourism partnerships with European topflight football clubs, 2020 was expected to be a good year for Rwanda’s tourism sector.&nbsp;



Furthermore, the Global Peace Index 2020 ranked ‘the land of a thousand hills’ as the second most peaceful country in the East African region after Tanzania and 14th in Africa, from 17th last year. It was all the more reason to believe 2020 would have been a landmark year for tourism in the country.



When Covid-19 was first identified in the country, the government suspended tourism and research activities in the three national parks namely Nyungwe, Gishwati-Mukura and the Volcanoes National Park, which are habitats of the renowned mountain gorillas and other primates.



Only Akagera National Park, home to ‘The Big Five’, remained temporarily open to visitors.



In the wake of the reopening of tourism, the Rwanda Development Board (RDB) has embarked on a promotional campaign for both Rwandan citizens and foreign visitors into these national attractions.



As Belise Kariza, Chief Tourism Officer at RDB, explains: “We’re seeing good trends since tourism reopened.



“We have 69 bookings for Volcanoes National Park in a span of a week which is a very good indication. Out of them, 42 have confirmed bookings.



&nbsp;“In terms of international tourists, they usually plan between one month-and-plus ahead of time but the good news is that we’ve got a lot of inquiries about the functionality of testing and more queries and hopefully we’re going to see international tourists arriving.”



She points out that the government’s strategy for tourism recovery will focus on domestic tourism while international tourism will be reopened in a phased manner.



Operators in the sector believe the pandemic should be an opportunity to strengthen indigenous tourism given the fact that international travel will take long to normalize. But Habimana of Wilson Tours and Travel Agency observes that traveling isn’t a passion for many Rwandese, especially now.



“Traveling isn’t a basic need and now people are stretched, some have lost their jobs, or had their salaries cut. It’s not easy to develop a package and convince them,” he says.



He believes offering promotional prices alone won’t be effective and recommends that the government also invests in behavior-change campaigns.



Rwanda’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has been regarded by many as a success after the country made it to the list of 15 countries from where travelers are allowed into the European Union (EU) from July 1.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">&#8220;Using regional marketing and promotion strategies, countries can co-create programs and opportunities to recover, develop joint messages of solidarity to draw interests from travelers with a diversified product, pricing and packaging offers.” &#8211; Toyin Abiodun</blockquote>



Besides Rwanda, only Morocco and Tunisia are included from the continent, as the EU member states consider these countries safe due to their epidemiological situation related to the coronavirus.



While most of the pandemic-induced hardships appear to be in the past, the tourism and hospitality sector is far from getting back on its feet.



In order for it to rebound, experts say that a number of steps must be followed to ensure a balance between reopening whilst ensuring people are safe from the virus.



Toyin Abiodun, the Strategic Advisor at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, tells FORBES AFRICA the steps include dialogues with industry players to draw out short-term tailored practical measures, ensure adequacy of a variety of infrastructure components for travel to and from tourist locations and continuously send out strong messages on the safety and security African destinations offer foreign travelers. She also believes regional coordination would significantly support the sector’s recovery. “Using regional marketing and promotion strategies, countries can co-create programs and opportunities to recover, develop joint messages of solidarity to draw interests from travelers with a diversified product, pricing and packaging offers.”



Toyin adds that this would help reduce the adjustment costs associated with setting up individual protocol systems and ensure integration that enhances cross-country intel-sharing to restore traveler confidence.



Tour consultant Fridah advises that tour companies shouldn’t lose hope but rather keep on promoting their packages and revise their prices so as to be afloat.



“In addition, in cases where a company feels over-staffed, they shouldn’t fire their workers but rather come to an agreement to either pay them commission or half-salary because firing them will not bring in business.”



She explains that social media has been one of the ways she now promotes her business.



“I have been engaging with our audience on our social media handles, posting pictures for them not to lose hope [about] traveling again.”



Surely, the operative word is hope, not just for tourism, but for every industry on the planet now fighting for survival.



– By Steven Muvunyi

The-Kigali-Convention-Centres-design-is-inspired-by-traditional-Rwandan-baskets

Slowly But Surely: Tourism’s Renewal In Rwanda

Sitting in the foyer of a Kigali hotel with Raj Rajendran, sipping Rwandan tea, the conversation centers around Coimbatore, the bustling textile town in South India about 3,500 miles from Kigali.
When Rajendran speaks about his hometown, in the South Indian language of Malayalam this writer is familiar with, he manages to create a vision of Coimbatore that is a mirror image of Kigali.
The balmy air, the foliage, the clean roads and the warm enterprising people of Coimbatore could be cut and pasted in Kigali, and nothing would seem out of place.
<div id="attachment_3154" style="width: 215px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3154" class="size-medium wp-image-3154" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Raj-Rajendran_3924-701x1024-205x300.jpg" alt="" width="205" height="300" />Raj Rajendran MD of GreenLeaf, founded about a year ago to market farm products to high-end hotels and restaurants. They are opening a new shop in June selling packaged vegetables and fruits. He is also a partner in two other companies he started recently</div>
It is little wonder Rajendran feels at home in Kigali, and although his family lives in Coimbatore, this is where he will spend the rest of his working life, and even retire in.
The affection this affable entrepreneur has for Rwanda is evident in the love Rwanda has for him. Rajendran is very popular amongst his friends and business associates here.
RwandAir CEO John Mirenge calls him munyaneza, meaning ‘joyful’ in Kinyarwanda.
“He is very well-liked,” says Mirenge.
For Rajendran, the journey from Coimbatore to Kigali was one of discovery – and serendipity.
Like any Tamil boy born and raised in Coimbatore – known as the Manchester of South India for its ubiquitous spinning mills – Rajendran studied textile engineering like his bespectacled peers, from the prestigious PSG College of Technology.
Not surprisingly, he started his career in a spinning mill in Coimbatore in 1974, thereafter arming himself with an MBA in marketing and foreign trade. After a stint with the National Handloom Development Corporation, an Indian government organization, which saw him traveling across India, he joined as the group president of a global company with interests in finance, education, real estate and plantations.
He was in Coimbatore when in 1999, somebody tipped him off about an opening in a country called Rwanda.
“I didn’t have any chance of knowing, I didn’t know where it was,” says Rajendran.
The job offered was as the Managing Director of UTEXRWA, the only textile manufacturing company in Rwanda at the time.
“I did a quick search on Yahoo and saw a picture of Kigali’s commercial street. It looked so pathetic, much worse than our [Indian] villages at the time. I found that all of Rwanda only had one textile company, unlike Coimbatore which had so many. I also read up on the genocide and found that about 300 people in the company [UTEXRWA] had been killed; that got me interested.”
UTEXRWA was started in 1985 as a family-owned company and fabric processing house.
“They had $18 million in 1993 which was very good. But in 1994 [during the genocide], everything was looted, all their raw materials. They incurred heavy cash losses in the subsequent years until 1998,” says Rajendran.
By the end of 1999, Rajendran was on board. He was yet to discuss the terms and conditions of his contract, but he came – relying solely on instinct.
He was in for a pleasant surprise –
and has never regretted his decision.
“I loved the country’s beauty, the climate and the people. I have traveled all over Africa, but Rwanda is incomparable. Africa may be synonymous with filth and corruption, but everything here is reliable and systematic. They have a culture of cleanliness. And they have the best leadership.”
Rajendran recalls his first meeting with Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame.
“My first interaction with him was the day he was sworn in, at the cocktail party held in his honor. We shook hands and I got a picture taken with him. He is not known to smile, but that picture had him smiling, and people asked: who is this guy who made him laugh?”
In 2000, Rajendran says he was invited as the only foreigner from the private sector to be part of the delegation for the president’s state visit to Nairobi. That is when Rajendran told him about the possibility of producing silk in Rwanda – like they did back home.
“The climatic conditions for silk in Rwanda are the same as in India. About 85 percent of India’s mulberry silk is from [the South Indian state of] Karnataka. The soil, the climatic conditions and terrain were similar to those of Karnataka in those days. I told him we don’t need to import silk, that Rwanda is fully capable of producing it,” says Rajendran, who was consequently asked to explore the possibilities at UTEXRWA.
He traveled to Karnataka, and brought back with him 100 mulberry stems, which he planted at UTEXRWA, and also in Rwanda’s eastern province.
“They grew so well and with leaf sizes four times bigger than we have seen in India, and much healthier,” says Rajendran.
In 2003, the Food and Agriculture Organization sent a Korean expert to meet with Rajendran, bringing with him silkworm eggs. The mulberry trees had grown by then.
“The cocoons were much bigger than the ones I saw in India. The Koreans gave a positive report. We wanted a bigger project to create more employment. And at the annual retreat that year in Rwanda, it was decided that sericulture is big business.”
Starting with four model units and machinery, UTEXRWA started processing. Rajendran also introduced Indian handloom fabrics.
“I brought a little bit of South India into Rwanda. We made silk ties, scarves, garments, and even exported silk pyjamas to Canada. I once made 20 different ties for Kagame,” says Rajendran.
After about 12 years with UTEXRWA, Rajendran decided to head home. He boarded the plane to India, but he left his heart in Kigali.
He returned to Rwanda a year later, this time, as an entrepreneur, co-founding an investment promotion company called Proman Associates, and Payoda, handholding investors, offering them all the information they needed to easily set up business in Rwanda.
Rajendran is also currently the Managing Director of Green Leaf, an enterprise in Kigali linking farmers with retail and offering packaged fruits and vegetables for the high-end market such as five-star hotels, restaurants and department stores.
He is also keen on reviving the sericulture business in Rwanda. From Coimbatore to Kigali, the silk route beckons again.

The Silky Entrepreneur  Who Made Kagame Laugh

What drew you to the aviation industry?
I decided to become a pilot when I was four years old. I would see the big noisy bird take off and land at Bujumbura International Airport. I was fortunate enough to fly on the big bird, when I was seven years old, on a family trip to the United States. It was my first flight on a commercial airplane and I loved it.
&nbsp;
Where did you study?
I started my training at Soroti Flying School, also known as East Africa Civil Aviation Academy, in Uganda. I then got a scholarship with RwandAir to continue my commercial license training at Vero Beach Florida, US, at Flight Safety Academy.
&nbsp;
How many people graduated from your flight school and how many of them were women?
At Soroti Flying School, two women had graduated before me that I know of. At Flight Safety Academy, the number was bigger. There were up to 20 female students from all over the world, including the first female pilot from Saudi Arabia, Hanadi Zakaria al-Hindi. There were about 10 female instructors and the chief pilot, Nancy Ritter, was also female. But as many as we were, we did not even make up five percent of the academy.
&nbsp;
How did you feel when you became the first female pilot in Rwanda?
Making history is not my goal, achieving my goals is what I delight in. After getting my commercial license I did not celebrate, I was looking forward to the next cockpit I would get into.
&nbsp;
Your father passed away in a plane crash when you were eight. Did that affect your decision in any way?
No, it did not keep me from my dream. We do not stop driving because loved ones die in car crashes, why stop now? However, it made me realize the value of lives I have on board, so safety is definitely a big deal to me as a pilot.
&nbsp;
Why do you think there are so few women pilots in the world?
Aviation is perceived to be a male career. As the first female pilot in Rwanda, I feel proud to have paved the way for all young dreamers, male or female, to achieve their dreams.
&nbsp;
What challenges have you faced? Do you feel you always have to prove yourself as a woman?
I like to view my challenges as the reasons to celebrate having reached my goal. As a woman in a male-dominated field, there is no doubt that you have to prove yourself, but hard work always pays off.
&nbsp;
What is your power principle?
Do what you love to do and people will appreciate it.

Tag: RwandAir

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Slowly But Surely: Tourism’s Renewal In Rwanda

The Silky Entrepreneur Who Made Kagame Laugh

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