Rwanda has decided to electrify its fleets. Now comes the hard part

Rwanda's new procurement rule makes it mandatory for public institutions to ensure that at least 30 per cent of newly procured vehicles are fully electric, in line with the country's transition to e-mobility. Effectively meeting that requirement, however, involves far more than simply buying electric vehicles. The Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-Chain (ACES), working with the UK fleet-electrification specialists Flexible Power Systems, has built tools to help fleets and government institutions plan and design the transition, including Total Cost of Ownership. Operators should reach out before, not after, the purchase order is signed. In April 2026, the Government of Rwanda did something quietly radical. It stopped asking the market to switch its vehicles to electric and start leading by example. A new circular from the Ministry of Infrastructure now requires that at least 30 per cent of every public institution's new vehicles are fully electric, with exemptions requiring written approval. ALSO READ: Govt mandates 30% electric vehicles in public procurement The move reflects a clear national ambition to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 53% by 2035 compared to its business as usual, and achieve a net-zero economy by 2050. Rwanda intends to be one of the first countries in Africa to move its fleets to electric, and it is using its own buying power to get there. This is the right ambition. I want to be clear about that before I say anything else. The country is ahead of its neighbours, and it is ahead for the right reasons. The part the sticker price skips But with Michael Ayres at Flexible Power Systems, we have spent a long time around this change in a number of countries, and learned to be wary of the easy part – buying an electric vehicle. Switching a whole fleet – or even part of it – is a much bigger job than a single purchase, and it is easy to underestimate. Here is what the sticker price does not tell you. An electric vehicle does not run on a battery alone. It runs on a plan. It runs on whether your depot has the electricity capacity to charge the fleet you have bought, and on whether that power is there at the hour you actually need it. A cold-chain operator whose vehicles come home at seven in the evening and must be full by five in the morning has a very different problem from one whose vehicles sit idle all day. And of course Rwanda is hilly, and hills use more energy. And Rwanda has wet and dry seasons which further complicate the plan. Our climate is kind to batteries for most of the year. But a refrigerated truck carries its own cooling unit, and that unit runs off the same battery. The hotter the day, the harder it works to keep the load cold, and it keeps drawing power even when the truck is parked if it can be plugged into the grid. None of this shows up when you sign the purchase order. All of it decides whether the vehicle can do its job. ALSO READ: How ACES–RDDP partnership will improve milk cold-chain system The diesel trap behind the depot Then there is the trap we have watched other countries walk straight into. You buy a clean fleet, you plug it in, and you find the grid cannot carry the load at the moment you charge. So, someone wheels in a diesel generator to fill the gap. You have not removed the diesel. You have moved it from under the bonnet to behind the depot, and you are now burning it less efficiently than the engine would have. We saw a version of this at the London Olympics in 2012, where a fleet of clean vehicles was charged from a bank of diesel generators parked out of sight. The vehicles were spotless. The system was not. If you do not plan the energy alongside the vehicle, you can spend a great deal of money and change almost nothing. The toolkit, and the partnership behind it This is the work the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-Chain (ACES) has been doing at our campus in Rubirizi. And we are not doing it alone. Getting a fleet transition right takes two kinds of expertise, and they rarely sit in the same place. One is a deep understanding of the African cold-chain demand: the routes, the crops, the heat, the grid, and what it costs when the journey from farm to market fails. That is our work. The other is the tested science of fleet electrification itself, how to model a duty cycle, size a charging site, match the right vehicle to the right route, and work out the true cost of the switch before a single vehicle is bought. For that we have partnered with Flexible Power Systems, a UK company that has spent years electrifying some of the most demanding commercial fleets in Europe, including major retailers and logistics operators moving refrigerated goods at scale. They have even built tools specifically for transport refrigeration, the exact problem that sits at the heart of a cold-chain fleet. Together we have built a set of practical tools for exactly this decision, aimed first at the cold-chain operators we work with, but useful to anyone moving a fleet. They take an operator through the whole journey: what the routes actually demand in energy, not in the optimistic range quoted in brochures; which vehicles can do the work once you account for terrain, load, weather and the refrigeration unit that runs whether the wheels turn or not; how many chargers you need, of what type, and whether your site can feed them without an expensive upgrade you did not budget for; when to charge so that you draw power at the cheapest hour and do not trip the limit on your connection; and if operating off-grid, whether you have enough solar power and store it for use when needed – alongside the other demands. At the heart of the toolkit sits the question most transitions get wrong, which is cost. Not the price on the day, but the cost across the whole life of the vehicle. This is what total cost of ownership means, and it is the fairest way to compare an electric vehicle with a diesel one. If you judge the decision on the purchase price alone, you will turn down the vehicle that was going to save you money. Our tools let an operator put in their own numbers and find that turning point before they commit, not after. There is a difference between what these tools offer a company and what they offer the Government, and it matters now more than ever because of the new rule. For a company, the tools answer a direct, practical question. Can I run my deliveries on electric vehicles without breaking my schedule or my budget, and if so, which vehicles, charging where and when? It is the difference between a confident switch and an expensive experiment. For the Government, the tools do something larger. They let a planner model an entire national fleet. Not only what it costs to buy, but what it demands of the grid, where the charging has to sit, how many technicians the country needs to keep the vehicles running, and what the change does to emissions and to the fuel import bill over a decade. When you are requiring 30 per cent across every public institution, this is no longer a paper exercise. Every government institution is about to make these decisions, many at the same time, most for the first time. Done with a plan, the rule delivers exactly the savings and the emissions cuts it promises. Done as a rush of separate purchases, it risks a fleet of clean vehicles that spend their days waiting for a charger, or charging from a generator. Talk to us before you buy To the companies now considering an electric fleet, and to the government institutions now working out how to meet the 30 per cent rule: we would be glad to help, and the best time to talk is before you buy. A short conversation at the planning stage can save a great deal later. That is precisely why ACES and Flexible Power Systems have brought our expertise together, and it is why we are here in Rwanda, ready to work alongside you. The country has made a bold decision, and made it early. Let us make sure the system behind the decision is as good as the decision itself. The writer is the Executive Director of the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-Chain (ACES), based at the Rubirizi Campus in Kigali. ACES works in partnership with Flexible Power Systems on fleet-electrification planning.

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Rwanda has decided to electrify its fleets. Now comes the hard part