Rwanda

Rwanda, officially the Republic of Rwanda, is a landlocked country in the Great Rift Valley of Central Africa, where the African Great Lakes region and Southeast Africa converge. It is highly elevated, giving it the soubriquet “land of a thousand hills”, with its geography dominated by mountains in the west and savanna to the southeast, with numerous lakes throughout the country. The climate is temperate to subtropical, with two rainy seasons and two dry seasons each year. Rwanda has a population of over 12.6 million.

Elevation accounts for Rwanda’s generally mild temperatures, which average 70 °F year-round at Kigali, There are significant variations, however, between the region of the volcanoes in the northwest, where heavy rainfalls are accompanied by lower average temperatures, and the warmer and drier interior highlands. Only a small percentage of the country is covered in natural forest vegetation. Reforestation programs have added eucalyptus trees to previously denuded hillsides and roadsides, though not on a scale sufficient to effectively counteract erosion.