Rwanda will on Saturday resume its Covid-19 nationwide vaccination campaign to fully immunise those who had previously received their first doses of the Oxford- AstraZeneca vaccines.

In a statement released on Friday, Rwanda Biomedical Centre said it received additional 247,000 doses of AstraZeneca through the Covax mechanism, including 117,600 doses donated by the French government.

“We are thankful to the Government of France and to other partners for their support in making these vaccines available. We will immediately start administration of second doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine,” said Dr Daniel Ngamije, Rwanda’s Minister of Health.

Rwanda needs at least 13 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine to inoculate 60 percent of the population, about 7.5 million people, which it targets to immunize by June 2022. So far, only 4 percent of the population has received the first dose of the vaccine.

In March, Rwanda vaccinated 350,465 people, with the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines.

“We continue discussions with a variety of stakeholders on getting more vaccines so that we can vaccinate as many Rwandans as we can, in order to defeat this pandemic.”

Currently, delivery of the second doses of AstraZeneca vaccines to Kigali is experiencing delays after India suspended vaccine exports due to an upsurge in domestic Covid-19 cases.

Rwanda was to receive Covid-19 vaccines in early April from the Serum Institute of India via the Covax Facility.