By President Ilham Aliyev

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BAKU, Azerbaijan, September 20.​ Rwanda has
also supported most of our initiatives aimed at strengthening
solidarity within the Non-Aligned Movement and joined them,
President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said during a joint press statement with President of Rwanda Paul Kagame,
Trend reports.

Statement by President Ilham Aliyev

– Dear Mr. President,

Dear guests, ladies and gentlemen,

First of all, I’d like to express gratitude to Mr. President for
visiting Azerbaijan. We met last time in Baku last November at COP
29, and at that time I invited Mr. President to pay an official
visit to Azerbaijan. I’m very grateful that he accepted my
invitation, and today is an official visit to our country.

I’m sure that this visit will give additional impetus to our
bilateral ties. We have already discussed different aspects of our
cooperation and expressed the mutual will to deepen and broaden our
partnership. Azerbaijan and Rwanda are good partners and friends.
We participate jointly in different international institutions and
always support each other. During our chairmanship in the
Non-Aligned Movement, Rwanda always supported us. They supported us
to be elected chair, and then, when our chairmanship was extended
for one more year, they also supported us and joined many of our
initiatives to strengthen solidarity within the Non-Aligned
Movement. Definitely, we always actively cooperate in the United
Nations and extend mutual support to each other.

I’m glad that in recent years our relations have become more
result-oriented. There have been different delegations from
Azerbaijan visiting Rwanda. Last year, the delegation of the Heydar
Aliyev Foundation visited Rwanda, and I’m grateful to Mr. President
for receiving the Vice President of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation,
Leyla Aliyeva. She was very impressed with what she had seen—the
large-scale development of the country and also the commitment of
the people to statehood, independence, and their independent
policy. We are also glad that the Heydar Aliyev Foundation has a
chance to support educational programs in your country. By the way,
this area, I think, should be one of the priorities in our
bilateral relationship. I looked at some information prior to Mr.
President’s visit and found out that we have only one student from
Rwanda studying in Azerbaijan. I think we can jointly work to
increase the number of students. It’s within the framework of the
state scholarship of Azerbaijan. There was a delegation from the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs this year and also a delegation from
the ASAN Agency, the public services agency, to Rwanda with respect
to established cooperation and maybe to set up something similar to
ASAN. I have already discussed it with Mr. President.

He will be visiting one of the public services centers in
Azerbaijan and will be very glad if we can provide technical and
financial assistance in order to establish this kind of agency in
Rwanda. We discussed today opportunities in the energy sector. Both
our countries are actively working on that, and also in the area of
mining, where there is potential to strengthen our cooperation. We
just need to have maybe more regular contacts on different levels
and exchanges of business delegations, delegations of different
ministries, in order to explore the opportunities of doing business
together and also investment opportunities. I expressed our
readiness to engage in investment projects in Rwanda, and I’m sure
that the visit of Mr. President, our discussions, and the
discussion which will follow the press conference will create a
very solid platform for partnership in the economic and trade area.
We have an excellent political relationship, so we need to have the
same level of relationship in all other areas.

Once again, Mr. President, thank you for visiting us. I wish you
a pleasant stay.