At the age of just 24, Esther Mbabazi has literally become a trailblazer for Rwandan women, as she is the country's first female pilot, in the service of the national carrier Rwandair. She was born in Burundi, where her family had moved due to the insecurity in Rwanda prior to 1994, and they moved back to their home country in 1996.
As the daughter of a father pastor and a mother farmer, the choice for the aviation industry was not obvious for Mbabazi, yet she dreamt of it from a young age. She was trained at the Soroti flight school in Uganda before being sponsored to continue her training in Florida by Rwandair. She now flies the company's CRJ-900 regional jets across Africa, and is fluent in five languages.
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