Google has announced separate partnerships with the Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure and the Kenya Education Network (KENET) which will result in Rwanda's educational institutions and government ministries, and Kenya's universities using Google Apps—Google's set of hosted and customizable communications services—Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Spreadsheets and Google Page Creator.

Students in both African countries as well as Rwandan government officials will have access to the free communications tools under their institutions' domain names.

Rwandan Minister of State for Energy and Communications, The Hon Albert Butare, said, "This partnership will be a boost in terms of services offered to our Rwandan Academic Institutions, allowing them to collaborate in their learning activities. Furthermore, I believe communication between students and their lecturers will be enhanced as users throughout the country will now be using the same state-of-the-art, cutting edge technology that is available in other parts of the world."

Three Rwandan universities—the National University of Rwanda, the Kigali Institute for Education and the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology—will initially have access to Google Apps Education Edition, while the country's government ministries will be using Google Apps Standard Edition. During this first phase, around 20,000 users in Rwanda will have access to these services. A broader countrywide rollout will follow shortly afterwards.

The University of Nairobi's 50,000 students will be the first to be offered Google Apps for Education in Kenya. These services will then be extended to 150,000 Kenyan students at universities across the country. The rollout will be jointly coordinated by Google and KENET.

Shona Brown, Senior Vice President of Business Operations at Google added, "Google has a simple ambition—to help organize the world's information, making it universally accessible and useful. For us, universality is crucial because we believe everyone should have access to the same services—wherever they live, whatever their language and regardless of income. I am delighted that we have signed this deal and look forward to working with other African governments to make life-enhancing services like free email, instant messaging and PC-to-PC phone calls more widely available across Africa."

Google Apps allows institutions as well as individuals to use Google's communication and collaboration applications under their own domain names. All services are hosted by Google and are available to users via any web-based PC.