Team AMANI: Rwandan champion Jazilla Mwamikazi signs for 2027

Team AMANI, the East African outfit most of us know from the Migration Gravel Race and the riders it has sent to Unbound, has signed Jazilla Mwamikazi for the 2027 season. The 22-year-old Rwandan won the African under-23 time trial title in Kenya on Wednesday, the day before the team announced her, and in 2024 she became the first Rwandan woman to ride the Olympic cross-country mountain bike race. She joins the women's road squad from the UCI World Cycling Centre's Continental team in Aigle, Switzerland.

AMANI's story started on gravel. Founded by the late Kenyan rider Sule Kangangi and the American lawyer Mikel Delagrange, the project built the Migration Gravel Race in the Maasai Mara and put East African riders on the start lines of Unbound, Badlands and the UCI Gravel World Championships. The road ambitions are newer and bigger. The women's team stepped up to UCI Continental level for 2026 as the first women's team at that level registered in Africa. It was launched at Rouleur Live last November with Ashleigh Moolman Pasio as mentor, POC, Factor and Rapha as partners and a stated aim of riding the Tour de France Femmes, the Giro and the Vuelta by 2028.

Mwamikazi fits that plan. She can time trial and she learned to ride on dirt, and two seasons in Europe mean a UCI peloton won't be new to her. We haven't seen her race in person; what follows comes from the team's announcement, checked against the results sheets.

From Rwanda's dirt roads to Aigle

Mwamikazi grew up riding the steep dirt roads of Rwanda and found her first proper team at the Ndabaga Cycling Team, the team says. She raced cross-country and road from the start and declined to pick one, and in June 2023 she won the under-23 title at the African Continental Mountain Bike Championships in Johannesburg. That result earned her a place at the UCI World Cycling Centre, where she raced UCI 2.1 events such as the Volta a Catalunya Femenina and the Bretagne Ladies Tour. At Paris 2024 she lined up in the women's cross-country race and finished 34th of the 36 starters.

This year she switched the emphasis to the clock. In June she won the elite women's time trial at the Rwandan national championships, and on 21 October she took the under-23 time trial at the African Continental Championships in Kenya, 27 seconds clear of South Africa's Marzaan Mellett, which makes her a continental champion in two disciplines at 22.

"I learned to ride on the red dirt roads of the hills at home, and every climb taught me discipline," Mwamikazi said in the team's announcement. "Racing at the Olympics showed me that a girl from those hills can reach the highest level of the sport. I joined Team AMANI because of its vision and its journey towards the Tour de France Femmes."

What the team gets

Tsgabu Grmay, AMANI's head of racing, picked out the mountain bike background. "She's an African champion and an Olympian in mountain biking, and that gives her the bike handling and confidence to hold her position in the peloton," he said. "It's something she can teach the other riders and use to give them confidence. She's young, she's aggressive, and she brings a character we don't yet have in the group."

The 2026 roster runs to six riders from Ethiopia and Rwanda, so a third Rwandan with a time trial engine fills an obvious gap. Mwamikazi is one of two new signings for 2027, and the team hasn't said who the other is yet.

Our take, for what it's worth from a gravel magazine: AMANI has spent the years since 2020 arguing that the talent is there and the barrier is the pathway. A rider who came up through mountain biking, went through the UCI's own development team and is now coming back to an African-registered squad is about as neat a demonstration of that pathway as you could draw. Whether it gets the team to a Tour de France Femmes start by 2028 is the question the next two seasons will answer.

Team AMANI's rosters, races and the Migration Gravel Race are at teamamani.com.