Kigali (Commonwealth Union)_Making sporting history and carrying the flag for gender equality to another level, Rwanda’s Salima Mukansanga is set to become one of the first women to referee at the FIFA World Cup 2022 to be held in Doha Qatar this month. She is one of three female referees slated to referee a men’s FIFA World Cup – Yamashita Yoshimi from Japan and Stephanie Frappart from France join her as female referees in the final list of 36 match referees for the tournament.
Mukansanga has been trailblazing continuously ever since she began blowing the whistle on the field, fueling her passion for the contact sport. She was the first woman from Rwanda to referee in the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup and the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games and also the first woman to ever officiate at a men’s match at the African Cup of Nations in Cameroon this year.
In 2016, she officiated at the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations for the final between Cameroon and Nigeria. She has been a FIFA registered international referee since 2012.
Born in 1988 in Rusizi Salma, the 34-year-old Mukansanga is not all about football however. She has a degree in Nursing and Midwifery from the University of Gitwe, Ruhango and her first love was basketball, which however she struggled with given the lack of facilities for the game. This made it impossible for her to continue fuelling her passion for the hoop. She kick-started the next best thing – football!
She managed the women’s and lower-tier men’s matches four years after getting on the field and her break arrived when she was discovered and given a chance at refereeing games across the African continent.
Today she is a celebrity in the sporting world. As she walks onto the field this month, Mukansanga becomes Rwanda’s sole representative at the Qatar World Cup, a feat that her countrymen will never let her forget, because they’ll be gathered in homes and shops, in schools and community centers, wherever there’s a television to watch and cheer her on, as she takes their hopes and dreams with her onto the field.
