President Paul Kagame touched down in Gaborone this afternoon for a two-day state visit to Botswana, welcomed at the airport by President Duma Gideon Boko.
The visit comes at Boko’s invitation and is expected to give both leaders the opportunity to review bilateral relations and explore new partnership frameworks, with Botswana’s government describing it as “an important step in advancing Botswana-Rwanda bilateral relations towards high-impact economic partnerships.
Senior officials from both countries spent May 4 and 5 in Gaborone for the Second Session of the Joint Permanent Commission on Cooperation, a bilateral mechanism first established after Kagame’s 2019 visit to Botswana, finalising cooperation agreements and laying the groundwork for the president-level talks.
A business forum also took place on May 5, bringing together private sector players from both countries ahead of the state visit. Kagame arrived with a cabinet delegation and a business contingent, making clear this is an economic mission as much as a diplomatic one.
The agenda for the Kagame-Boko talks spans digital trade, tourism, animal vaccine development, transport connectivity, and cooperation in the diamond value chain.
Kagame is also scheduled to tour the Diamond Trading Company Botswana. That last item is the most telling. Rwanda has no diamonds, but Botswana’s resource-based economy anchored in diamonds is seen as complementary to Rwanda’s ambition to become a regional trade and investment hub, with potential synergy through frameworks like the African Continental Free Trade Area.
What Botswana has in raw wealth, Rwanda has in governance infrastructure and digital systems, and Gaborone appears increasingly interested in learning from Kigali’s playbook.
Botswana Investment and Trade Centre CEO Keletsositse Olebile was direct about this dynamic: “We refer to Rwanda to build our foundation. We believe that through this collaboration, we will see more growth.”
Several agreements are set to be signed during the visit, including frameworks on trade and investment, institutional collaboration between the Botswana Investment and Trade Centre and the Rwanda Development Board, and a Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement.
The double taxation deal in particular should matter for business on both sides. without it, investors operating across the two markets face exposure to being taxed twice on the same income, which has historically suppressed cross-border commercial activity.
Trade volumes between the two countries remain modest, which means the headroom for growth is real, but it needs the structural groundwork that deals like this one are designed to provide.
The visit to Gaborone comes within the same week that Kagame made a working trip to Dar es Salaam for talks with Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan, a pattern of intensive diplomatic travel that tells its own story. Rwanda is navigating a complicated regional moment: an active ceasefire process in eastern DRC, ongoing tensions with Western donors over Kigali’s posture in that conflict, and an economy that needs new partners and new markets to sustain its growth trajectory.
Against that backdrop, the pivot to Botswana signals that Rwanda is stepping into a space where the goal is not just to export resources but to control more of their worth moving from participation to positioning.
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