Kigali, January 2010. A small, simple building. Fifty young Rwandan women. A brand-new college with no alumni, no reputation, and no proof that any of this would work. This was the Akilah Institute — Rwanda's first women's college — opening its doors with a diploma in Hospitality Management, the first of its kind in the country.
I still remember the energy in that room — the mix of nerves and determination on every face. None of us fully knew what we were building.
There was no Kigali Marriott Hotel. No Radisson or convention centre. No luxurious mountain lodges. Just sixteen years earlier, the country had endured a devastating genocide that killed nearly a million people. The five-star infrastructure that exists today was nothing more than architectural renderings and government PowerPoints that most people outside Rwanda did not take seriously.
We launched Akilah because we believed in a vision that most of the world did not. At the turn of the millennium, President Kagame had launched Vision 2020 — an audacious plan to transform one of the poorest and most traumatized nations on earth into a knowledge-based, middle-income country. A central pillar was tourism and hospitality: Rwanda would become a destination for high-end eco-tourism, conservation, and global conferences, with world-class service anchoring an economy creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.
The international development community was not convinced. Rwanda, unlike its neighbours Congo, Uganda, and Tanzania, had almost no natural resources. More than eighty percent of the country’s foreign exchange came from tea, coffee, and minerals. Gorilla tourism — the one asset everyone pointed to — was generating roughly a million dollars a year. I sat in meetings where smart, well-intentioned “experts” told us plainly: the country’s only real resources were gorillas and some tea and coffee. They should focus on exporting more of it and stop dreaming about luxury hotels.
We opened anyway. Designed a curriculum with local employers and the Rwandan government for jobs that did not yet exist, in hotels that had not yet been built. Our students were not joining an industry. They were becoming its foundation.
One of those students was Emmanuella Belle Uwimbabazi. She chose to enroll at a college that had no track record, in an industry that most Rwandans had never heard of as a career. It was a leap of faith — driven by curiosity about what this new field could become and a willingness to bet on herself when nothing was guaranteed.
This week, Emmanuella stood on a stage in Washington, D.C., and received the 2026 J. Willard Marriott Award of Excellence — the highest honor Marriott International bestows on anyone, anywhere. Given since 1987, only ten people receive it each year out of a workforce spanning more than 140 countries.
Emmanuella is the first person from East Africa to receive the prestigious award.
She is Director of Rooms Operations at the Kigali Marriott Hotel, where guest satisfaction under her leadership has reached historic levels — results that caught the attention of Marriott’s global executive board. She sits on the EMEA Rooms Operations Advisory Board, shaping service standards across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. She is pursuing an MBA and mentors young women entering Rwanda’s hospitality workforce — closing the circle, passing forward what she was given.
Emmanuella earned this. Not through luck or circumstance — through sixteen years of relentless discipline, deep pride in her craft, and a refusal to settle for anything less than excellence. She pursued her education while building her career. She studied the details that most people overlook and turned them into the standard everyone else follows. She led her teams with warmth and held them to the highest bar. The criteria on that medallion — achievement, character, dedication, effort, perseverance — are not just words Marriott chose. They are a description of how Emmanuella shows up every single day.
When I think about the Rwanda that Emmanuella enrolled in and the Rwanda that exists today, the numbers barely capture it.
In 2010, Rwanda welcomed 660,000 foreign visitors. By 2019, that had more than doubled to 1.6 million. In 2024, tourism contributed a record $1.5 billion to the national economy — 10% of GDP — and supported 386,000 jobs. Kigali now ranks second in Africa, behind only Cape Town, for international conferences hosted annually. A country the world once defined by tragedy now draws global leaders and investors who come to see what is being built here. We believed this was possible. That’s why we built Akilah. But even we could not have imagined the scale of what Rwanda has achieved
Marriott was one of the first to show up — and Emmanuella’s career is inseparable from what they built with us. In 2012, years before their Kigali hotel opened, Marriott partnered with Akilah to recruit women from our very first graduating class into an intensive training program across their hotels in Dubai and Doha. They invested in the people before the building went up. By the time the Kigali Marriott opened in 2016 — the first Marriott in sub-Saharan Africa — nearly forty Akilah alumnae had trained through that pipeline and were on the management team from day one. Emmanuella among them. Radisson, Sheraton, and others followed. An entire industry built from scratch in two decades — and our students are the ones running it.
None of it would have happened without the people who built Akilah from the ground up. Aline Kabanda, Karen Sherman, Rick Daniels, Maria Miracle, Holly Habimana, Lisa Lamprecht, Merrin Jenkins, and many others were there from the very beginning — building, designing, leading. They poured their hearts into creating this institution and forging the partnership with Marriott. They were joined by dozens of faculty members, global hospitality advisors, and curriculum designers who worked tirelessly alongside them, with the support of the Rwandan Ministry of Education, to build a program from nothing.
That program was built around a conviction that set Akilah apart: technical training alone would never be enough. Before we taught our students how to run a hotel or national park, we taught them how to lead — through debate, public speaking, meditation, and a social change project where every student had to design and implement something meaningful for her community. We invested first in building wise, grounded, confident women with the foundations to hold their own in any room they walked into. That was our secret sauce — and it is the reason our graduates didn't just fill positions in this industry but rose to the top of it.
Marriott met them with extraordinary commitment at every level. Ed Fuller, then President of International Lodging, drove the decision to enter Rwanda when most global brands wouldn’t look twice at sub-Saharan Africa. Gary Dodds, VP of Human Resources for the Middle East and Africa, designed and led the training program — and insisted our graduates be fast-tracked to supervisory and managerial roles, not entry-level positions.
Jeff Strachan, VP of Sales and Marketing, placed them across every department so they would return to Kigali ready to lead. Alex Kyriakidis, President and Managing Director for the Middle East and Africa, committed to replicating the Akilah model across the continent. And the late Arne Sorenson, Marriott’s President and CEO, stood in Kigali at the hotel’s opening and spoke about what Rwanda’s transformation meant to Marriott.
Kathleen Matthews, Chief Communications and Public Affairs Officer, championed our partnership on global stages — but what she did that changed everything was personal. She hosted a fundraiser for Akilah in Washington, D.C. with former World Bank President Bob Zoellick, stood on a stage in front of her family and friends, and urged them to give generously to a tiny startup college and its young, inexperienced founder, because she believed in the vision of empowering women through education. That evening changed our trajectory.
Emmanuella’s award is the proof of what all of these people built together. We will never forget what Marriott made possible.
Behind the partnerships, there were the mentors. Among the most important in Emmanuella’s journey was Dr. Carmen Nibigira — our Board Chair, an early champion of Akilah, and a trailblazer in East African tourism who dedicated fourteen years to mentoring our students. Carmen passed away in November 2024 at just 46. Many of you reading this knew her.
In Emmanuella’s own words:
“Carmen was not just a mentor to me — she was a very special part of my journey and a primary person who shaped the woman I am becoming today. She believed in me relentlessly, celebrated my wins, and challenged me to dream bigger than I thought possible. She taught me that women belong in global leadership spaces, and that excellence should always be carried with grace, humility, and purpose. Some mentors change your career. Carmen changed my life. This award is dedicated to her legacy and to every woman she inspired to rise fearlessly.”
If you have ever visited Kigali, you know that the city standing today is almost unrecognizable from what it was during and after the war. That transformation happened because a government had the courage to write a vision that most of the world dismissed — and because educators, corporate leaders, mentors, and donors chose to trust it. Together, they created an industry that has brought hope, dignity, and opportunity to hundreds of thousands of people — many of them genocide survivors and their children.
Since we opened in 2010, Akilah has educated over 6,000 young leaders across East Africa — nearly all of them on scholarships provided by donors who believe in the power of education to change lives. Emmanuella was one of them. It was the success of our hospitality graduates that gave Akilah the momentum to grow — from that single diploma program to new programs in information systems and business, a campus in Burundi, and the model of women’s leadership development that we are today. Everything Akilah has become traces back to those first fifty women.
Ninety-five percent of our early students were the first in their families to attend higher education — the generation who were children during the genocide, who grew up carrying the weight of a country’s grief and chose to pour themselves into rebuilding its future. They did not have the luxury of certainty. But they had conviction — in their country, in its vision, and in themselves. They poured their hearts into rebuilding Rwanda through education, through service, through the sheer force of showing up and doing the work of building a new economy from the ground up.
This week, one of those women stood on a stage in Washington, D.C. — in the country where experts once said Rwanda should stop dreaming — and held the proof of what becomes possible when a country believes in its daughters. She will not be the last.
— Elizabeth Dearborn Hughes, CEO & Co-Founder, Akilah Institute