On 10 September 2026, BWI signs an MoU with the Rwanda Space Agency at the International Space Summit in Paris to support data-driven water governance across Rwanda’s watersheds.
On September 10, 2026, Blue Water Intelligence (BWI) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Rwanda Space Agency (RSA) in Paris, during the Africa sequence of the first International Space Summit.
The agreement was signed by Philippe Gautier, President of BWI, and Mr. Gaspard Twagirayezu, Chief Executive Officer of the Rwanda Space Agency. It opens a cooperation focused on integrated water governance based on the digital, data-driven management of Rwanda’s watersheds.
Headquartered in Kigali, the Rwanda Space Agency is the governmental body mandated to develop Rwanda’s space sector for socio-economic development. Under the leadership of its Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Gaspard Twagirayezu, the agency works to turn space capabilities into concrete applications for national priorities — from land and agriculture to climate resilience and water.
Rwanda’s geography makes water a structural issue. The country sits at the headwaters of two of Africa’s major basins, the Nile and the Congo, across a landscape of steep slopes and dense drainage networks where rainfall variability translates quickly into flood and erosion risk downstream. Reliable, continuous monitoring of these watersheds is a prerequisite for managing them.
Through this MoU, BWI and RSA intend to assess opportunities for the deployment of BWI’s solutions in Rwanda, including its virtual hydrological stations and related forecasting services, with a view to strengthening data governance and hydrological monitoring systems, and to building capacity for basin governance.
The signature took place during a summit sequence dedicated to African space cooperation, at a moment when the continent’s space sector is expanding quickly and more than twenty national agencies are now active.
The day after the signature, Mr. Gaspard Twagirayezu joined BWI and its partners at the Space4Water Conference in Paris, a side event of the International Space Summit contributing to the UN Water Summit in Abu Dhabi in December 2026. The conference brought together space agencies, water administrations and financing institutions around a shared question: how countries can effectively leverage satellite data for water resource management.
This MoU is a direct answer to that question. At BWI, we believe that water resource management advances through cooperation between national institutions and technology providers — combining local knowledge of basins and institutions with satellite-based monitoring and forecasting.
