NYAGATARE, Rwanda – African Parks has now formally opened a new visitor centre in the heart of the Akagera National Park, which they manage in a joint venture with the Rwanda Development Board’s Tourism and Conservation Department.

Located along the 7 tent Rusizi Safari Lodge the new centre will give visitors a greater insight into the park’s history, ecology and wildlife, and was constructed with the generous help and assistance by the US based Walton Foundation, which has todate injected over half a million US Dollars into the project at Akagera.

Akagera is the first park in Rwanda to be secured with an electric fence covering some 120 kms of boundary lines, aimed to protect the neighboring communities from straying elephant and buffalo, which have in the past regularly raided small farms and caused loss of property and life among the rural population living on the edges of the park.

RDB and the park managers used the opportunity to provide impressive figures of increased visits to Rwanda’s one and only savannah national park, which saw a 40 percent increase in park entries over the past three financial years and a 73 percent revenue growth over the same period. Tourism is the single most important source of foreign exchange and has in recent years grown by double digit figures as a result of product diversification away from the singular image as a gorilla tracking destination to one of multiple attractions of equal standing, including Akagera National Park.