RWANDA PRESIDENT APPOINTS NEW INFRASTRUCTURAL MINISTER

President Paul Kagame appointed Jimmy Gasore as the new Minister of Infrastructure on Tuesday, September 12. Gasore replaces Ernest Nsabimana, who was appointed in January 2022.

Gasore is a former lecturer at the University of Rwanda who taught atmospheric sciences. He was also Station Chief Scientist for the Rwanda Climate Observatory and a research fellow at the Kigali Collaborative Research Center (KCRC).

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics from the National University of Rwanda (2008) and a PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (February 2018).

From 2013, Gasore worked to set up the Rwanda Climate Observatory; a comprehensive field station that monitors atmospheric composition related to climate change, air pollution and ozone depletion. The station is part of the MIT lead Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), an international network measuring atmospheric composition using high-frequency on site measurements with standardized protocols and instrumentations.

The Rwanda Climate Observatory is the only AGAGE station in Africa. He used the observations from these monitoring sites to estimate regional emissions of carbon dioxide and methane as part of his PhD thesis. A thesis that earned the “Rossby awards” as the best thesis in the program in Atmosphere, Oceans and Climate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Between 2017 and 2018, Gasore led a Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA) air quality monitoring project. He was responsible for setting up instruments to monitor the levels of pollutants and chemical composition of particulate matter in order to understand the drivers of air pollution in Rwanda and advise policy.