Fully vaccinated travellers to Rwanda will no longer be required to quarantine at hotels upon arrival. This is one of the new decisions taken by the government during a cabinet meeting that took place on Wednesday, October 13. However, all arriving and departing passengers must present a negative Covid-19 PCR test taken within 72 hours prior to departure. Upon arrival, incoming travellers are required to take a second PCR test. These new measures took effect from Thursday, October 14. Apart from the new guidelines, anyone travelling to Rwanda is obliged to fill a Public Health passenger locator form before heading to the country that can be accessed on the official website of Rwanda Biomedical Centre The form requires information including one’s passport information, their travel details, including times and dates, and a negative PCR Covid-19 test certificate. Persons under 5 years old, travelling with a guardian/parent, may not need to complete their own form, provided: they will arrive and leave together, will stay at the same address in Rwanda, and the details of the dependents are added into the guardian’s/parent’s form. With more and more people getting vaccinated in Rwanda, the government has continued to ease Covid-19 related restrictions. For example, the country has eased the nationwide Covid-19 curfew, allowing people to make movements outside their homes from 4am until midnight. This is the first time that Covid-19 preventive measures have been eased to such an extent in the country since March last year when authorities started restricting peoples movements in a bid to curb the spread of the virus. According to statistics from the Ministry of Health, by Wednesday, more than 2.7 million people in Rwanda had received the first dose of the vaccine, and of these, 1.7 had been double-jabbed. Meanwhile, some foreign countries have recently relaxed restrictions against travellers from Rwanda. These include the Netherlands, which, about two weeks ago, placed Rwanda in the “yellow category,” making it the only country on the African continent with such eased restrictions. Travellers from “yellow countries” are allowed to enter the Netherlands, though with caution. Recently, France and the USA also eased restrictions for travellers from Rwanda.
