President Paul Kagame has held bilateral talks with Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs, on Monday as she visited Rwanda for the landmark launch of BioNTech’s mRNA vaccine manufacturing plant on the African continent.
Minister Baerbock is the most senior German government official to travel to Rwanda since the two nations renewed diplomatic ties in 2008.
Her visit underscores strengthening Rwanda-Germany relations following years of strain related to Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.
During their meeting, President Kagame and Minister Baerbock discussed Rwanda and Germany’s growing cooperation on shared priorities around development, trade, climate action, and investment. Both leaders championed the new BioNTech plant as a model for biomedical partnerships between Africa and Europe.
The facility comes at a time when only one in 100 vaccine doses administered in Africa is currently produced on the continent, a figure that African leaders hope could be 60 times higher by 2040.