(Bloomberg) — Rwanda plans to invest in its space industry to more than triple the contribution of information and communications to 10% of gross domestic product over the next decade.
The East African nation is seeking partners to build its own satellites, partly to create back up international connectivity and for collection of spatial data for government agencies, Information and Communications Technology Minister Paula Ingabire said in an interview late Monday.
Rwanda launched its first telecommunications satellite in 2019 in partnership with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Currently, the ICT sector makes up about 3% of annual output.
“Rwanda has bigger ambitions in building a space sector, what we seek to do as a country is to build partnerships with different satellite companies,” the minister said.
Part of the investment will be through the private sector as the national space agency won’t have capacity to do everything, Ingabire said. Rwanda filed a request with the International Telecommunications Union in 2021 for a company known as eSpace that plans of launch “multiple thousands” of satellites within the next one year, she said.
“We need to have space startups, space companies that are either into the designing and manufacturing of satellites, end-user terminals but at the same time having companies that can leverage the data collected from satellites and analyze and come up with different solutions,” Ingabire said.
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