The Esri Companies

For more than 40 years, Esri Inc. has been an innovator and the leading developer of GIS. Esri Inc. is serving some 350,000 clients in some 150 countries worldwide. Esri develops GIS that enable users in nearly every type of organization to efficiently manage, use, and serve geographic information. Esri inspires and enables people to positively impact the future through a deeper geographic understanding of the changing world around them.

Esri Inc. is the developer of the renowned ArcGIS system, today's de-factor standard in GIS.

As one of the three largest Esri Inc. international distributors, Esri Deutschland GmbH sells Esri products, provides support and training courses for these products, and develops customized solutions to meet the users’ needs in various fields of application.

Since 2006 Esri Deutschland GmbH has been involved in the implementation of GIS in Rwanda. Esri Deutschland supports the GIS Centre of the National University of Rwanda (CGIS-NUR) and assisted in the set-up of the CGIS-NUR Kigali office at the ICT Park. In addition, Esri Deutschland also facilitated access to a site license for the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). In 2010 Esri Deutschland founded Esri Rwanda Ltd. and handed its African activities over to this new company.

Esri Deutschland GmbH bundles the assets and activities of several complementary GIS companies in Germany, Switzerland, and Rwanda. 

• Esri Schweiz AG: regional sales, support, and services for Switzerland
• Esri Rwanda Ltd.: regional sales, support training, and services for Rwanda, Burundi, and the Republic of Congo
• con terra GmbH: applied technology, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI)
• Geocom Informatik AG: GIS services and special solutions for utilities and infrastructure

There is growing demand for maps, for GIS and especially for Esri products in Africa. To better serve this demand locally Esri Rwanda Ltd. was registered on 19 August 2010 as a Rwandan company and is since the official and sole representative of Esri Inc. for Rwanda, Burundi and the Republic of Congo. With an office in the heart of Kigali, Esri Rwanda is able to better serve existing and new clients, and to offer on-the-job training, workshops, and consultancy.

Esri Rwanda provides GIS solutions to government agencies, the private sector, donors, international organizations and NGOs throughout the region of the African Great Lakes. Esri Rwanda aims at building GIS capacity by bringing the vast GIS implementation experience of the global Esri community to the country and transferring it to local experts (e.g. graduates from local universities). For projects requiring special non-GIS knowledge, Esri Rwanda collaborates with external domain matter experts while assuming the overall responsibility for high standards of quality and timely delivery.

Esri Rwanda Ltd. is an official business partner of DigitalGlobe for providing imagery products and of Trimble for providing GPS devices to its clients.