Security, Air transport, health, commerce and environment are among the areas of partnership discussed between Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente and the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the Arab Republic of Egypt, Aly Abdel Aal.

The discussions on bilateral and continental wide relations between the two countries were held on Thursday at the Prime Minister’s Office.

Speaking to the media, Olivier Nduhungirehe, the Minister of State for East African Community Affairs outlined the areas of partnership between Egypt and Rwanda.

"The discussions focused on the cooperation among African Union members considering that Egypt President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi currently leads the African Union after he replaced President Paul Kagame,” he said.

He said both Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and President Kagame as well as South Africa’s president through TROIKA, the platform that is made of  the current AU president, the outgoing president and the forthcoming one are working together to develop the union based on different achievements.

AfCFTA implementation

"For instance recently in Niamey in Niger, AU launched the operations of The African Continental Free Trade Area after the number of required ratifying countries had been met.

Now the phase of implementing the agreement has started and it requires cooperation among AU members. More is also still being done to make the continent self-dependent,” he noted.

At the bilateral level, cooperation between Egypt and Rwanda focuses on different areas including security.

"In December last year in Egypt, Rwanda Chief of Defence Staff discussed with his counterpart about the cooperation in terms defense force training,” he said.

He said that air transport is another area of partnership following that in April this year EgyptAir launched flights between Cairo and Kigali twice a week.

"There is partnership between EgyptAir and RwandAir so that they exchange passengers. For instance now RwandAir flies to many countries in the region such as Kinshasa, Harare, Lusaka and elsewhere. This means passengers from those countries and other who wish to go to Egypt can use RwandAir to reach Kigali and then EgyptAir takes them to Cairo. In the next years, RwandAir can also grow and start flights to Egypt,” he explained.

Nduhungire highlighted that the other area of cooperation is health sector whereby Egypt is developed in terms of medicine and hospital equipment.

With this potential, he said that partnership will be strengthened.

"There are some local private hospitals that work with investors from Egypt  to avail sophisticated equipment for testing heart diseases, dialysis and others on which some agreements were signed and we have to continue such development,” he said.

The official noted that other Egyptian investors have invested in mining sector, industries adding that a team of investors, last month, visited Rwanda Private Sector Federation and the ministry of trade and industry to discuss about exchanging exports between the two countries.

The Egypt parliament speaker’s call on the Premier follows other courtesy visits to his Rwanda counterpart speaker Donathile Mukabalisa and the senate president, Bernard Makuza which took place on Wednesday.

editor@newtimesrwanda.com