Rwanda at 31: human skills, human values Rwanda’s holistic approach to education and development in the post-genocide years

1 Genocide and recovery: the role of education

The genocide against the Tutsi, carried out over 100 days in 1994, left around one million people dead, most of them Tutsis and some Hutus who had opposed the extermination of the Tutsis. For more than 30 years before that, there had been flares of violence against the Tutsis that might have signalled a graver danger ahead for Rwanda, but the genocide^[1] was a convulsion of such extreme fury that few could have predicted it.

Most people would quickly agree that, in the aftermath of genocide, education must have an important role in rebuilding a shattered nation. But when we consider education in the context of the genocide, we must look through a different lens. To understand the role of education in reconstruction and reconciliation, it is necessary first to understand a fact little-known by people from outside Rwanda: education played a key role in causing the genocide.

2 Education for genocide

Schools were introduced to the region by colonial powers; most were run by Roman Catholic missionaries, and their goals were to proselytize and to train administrators who could faithfully and obediently serve the colonial power. Indigenous values and knowledge were largely ignored or discouraged.

In line with racial theories that were prevalent in Europe in 19th century, the colonial era advanced the idea that Hutus, Tutsis and the Twa were fundamentally different races and separate people. During the first half of the 20th century, the colonial leaders used these supposed differences to play one side against the other in order to reinforce their own power. Under this divide-and-rule approach, wealthy Tutsis were educated and favored as the rulers; Hutus and poor Tutsi had many disadvantages. When these educated Tutsis began to press for independence, the colonial power (Belgium) shifted support to Hutu groups that were hostile to the Tutsis.

Hutu groups, supported by the colonial power and the Catholic Church, took power in 1959, abolished the kingdom and established a republic. The nation achieved independence three years later, in 1962. In this period, broad repression of the Tutsi was initiated forcing many into exile in the neighboring countries of Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Uganda and those who remained became second-class citizens.

Schools became a forum for the teaching of prejudice and hatred, first through preferential treatment, and then in the curriculum itself.

During the First Republic, under President Grégoire Kayibanda, discrimination against Tutsi became systematic, at times giving way to massacres.^[2] In these years, preferences in school admissions were given to students who, like the president, were from Central Rwanda. Most Tutsi were denied access to secondary schools and university. In the Second Republic, beginning in 1973 under President Juvénal Habyarimana, that regional bias was shifted to a preference for students from Northern Rwanda. But Tutsi access to schools was constrained by ethnic quotas.

This systematic discrimination filtered further into the classrooms of even very young students. Teachers often established at the start of the year which students were Hutu and which were Tutsi. In arithmetic, a teacher might lead the students in subtraction drills: “If there are five snakes in a village and two are killed, how many snakes remain to be killed? If there are five Tutsis in a village and three are killed, how many Tutsis remain to be killed?” In classroom and public meetings Tutsis were often called snakes, cockroaches. This left many students with a deep negative impression of Tutsis from an early age. The schools were teaching hatred and violence and planting the seeds of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

In Rwanda’s universities, discrimination and a lack of resources shaped the composition of the student body. At a time when the nation’s population was 7 million, the National University of Rwanda accepted only 400 to 500 new students per year. Only about 2,000 students earned a bachelor’s degree in the 30 years before 1994 from this sole university of the nation. So the competition to enter the university was very intense and only students with powerful connection within the circles of power succeeded.

These factors created a great deal of social tension. The child of one family might go through primary school and high school and then be admitted to the university; but their neighbour’s child might be barred from further education after 8th grade even if he/she performed better in school. This discrimination in education could turn neighbours into enemies.

As for school technology, it was all but non-existent at the primary and secondary levels. Before the civil war, Rwanda’ had a population of about 7 million, but only about 8,000 telephone lines, (Republic of Rwanda 2006) and most of the telecommunication infrastructure was destroyed during the fighting.

It should be noted that traditional schools, before independence, also were biased against girls and young women. When discrimination limits access to schools, the impact is felt for decades.

Refugees, too, faced particular challenges. If your family was forced to go to one of the countries surrounding Rwanda – Burundi, Congo, Tanzania or Uganda – the children could rarely get an education beyond primary school. Even the best students, completing secondary school education, could not count on admission to universities in their host countries.

3 Schools as the setting for rage, violence and death

We think of schools as places of enlightenment, where students can develop and begin to fulfill their potential. But during that era in Rwanda, schools were hubs of division and hostility. When the Rwandan civil war culminated in the 1994 genocide, school buildings and campuses were, inevitably, settings for rage and violence.

Some 45,000 Tutsi, who took refuge at Murambi Technical School in southern Rwanda, were massacred and the school site has now been transformed into the Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre. Nationwide, more than 600 primary schools were destroyed. An estimated 3,000 teachers were killed or forced to flee (Tarnden 2006).

The National University of Rwanda in Butare also was a site for unimaginable crimes. Some of the university’s leading administrators and faculty members helped to shape genocide ideology and the plans for killing. Some of these leaders mobilized students to take part in murdering their fellow students. Professors killed professors. Hundreds of students and professors died or fled (Ntambara 2009).

The Rwandan Patriotic Front gradually put a stop to the genocide, capturing Kigali on 4 July 1994 and completely liberating the country on 22 August 1994 when it forced the withdrawal of the French troops of Turquoise Operation that had occupied the Southwestern part of Rwanda. Even with this victory, try to imagine what faced the new leaders of Rwanda. The people were shattered. The country was in ruins. And yet, the nation’s new leaders had to quickly find a way to create a sense of law and order, stability and safety and provide the survivors of genocide a new desire to live.

4 Education for recovery

One of the early decisions was striking for its clear sense of purpose: The schools had to reopen in time for the start of the school year. This showed, from the very first days after the genocide ended, that the government of Rwanda considered education to be central. If education was a factor in causing civil war and genocide, it must also be a factor in reconciliation and unity.

In practical terms, this was not an easy decision. Many of the buildings had been damaged or destroyed. There were still bodies in some of them. Many teachers were dead or gone. Tens of thousands of the students were orphans, and others were abandoned by their families and displaced. The nation therefore faced a choice: Do you leave the children in the street? Or do you bring them to school, begin to restore a sense of normalcy, and begin to rebuild for the future?

For the students’ sake, and for the nation’s security, you could not leave them in the street or isolated in the countryside. What would happen in a community if there were a hundred children with nothing constructive to do? They had to resume their lessons in math, and science, and language. Even more important, the schools had to quickly become a place for learning about values, human rights and respect for life. It was a very difficult challenge, and it required an enormous amount of work, but when the schools opened in October 1994, it was an historic achievement.

Similarly, the government placed great importance on re-opening the National University. With such a heavy human toll among students and faculty, and with books, computers, lab equipment and infrastructure destroyed, the university was forced to close for nearly a year. But after a great effort, classes resumed there in April 1995, about eight months after the genocide ended. A year later, the university opened a new School of Information Sciences and Technologies And two years after that, Master-level studies were added at the Faculty of Medicine. It’s evident that the leaders already had a vision for the future course of the university, and the future of the nation.

5 A necessary commitment

I was born in Rwanda, but my family was forced to flee to Burundi when I was very young. That’s where I grew up, and my earliest professional work was as a math teacher there. During the Rwandan civil war and the genocide, I was in the United States, conducting research and teaching physics and mathematics at Clark Atlanta University. With friends in the Rwandan diaspora, I had been working to make U.S. political leaders aware of the civil war and the government’s human rights abuses. When the genocide began, we redoubled our efforts.

Many of us lost family and close friends back in Rwanda. And so, when the genocide was stopped and the war had ended, it seemed that the best thing that I could do, as a member of the diaspora, was to make some sort of contribution to education. Some people think they have to wait until they can bring a laboratory back to Rwanda or bring a piece of expensive equipment. But I thought that if I could just give a small contribution every year – teach a seminar or a course or participate in a conference – that would be helpful. Over time, the value would compound.

My first return to Rwanda, after the genocide, was in April 1996, around the time of the second anniversary. With some colleagues, I visited the National University, and in Kigali, we met with the minister of education. What impressed me was the sense of commitment among administration and staff, and the clear sense that they were making progress. Already, the university was beginning to benefit from international partnerships. Because so many of the faculty were gone, visiting scholars from Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and other universities in the region had come to teach the students. The Dutch government provided funds to the university through the United Nations Development Programme. The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International donated $10,000 for the university – a lot of money, at the time. A couple of years later, the Fund supported the founding of the university’s Centre for Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing (Glanz 2000).

Seeing so much energy and commitment, with people working many hours to rebuild the university, left me with a profound sense of hope. And so, I continued to return every year to offer what I could to students and colleagues on the faculty. During those visits, I worked with faculty members and sometimes senior administrators. In time, I came to a deeper understanding of the issues related to higher education in Rwanda, and how important strong universities could be for a country’s reconstruction. And I came to know my home country in a way that I had never known it before.

In March 2001, I received an invitation to become the minister of education in Rwanda. I didn’t know how this came about, but I remember my immediate response: “Definitely, yes.” A few months later I returned to Rwanda, and in August, I started my new job overseeing education, science, research and technology. A year before my becoming the minister of education, the government of Rwanda had adopted a 20-year development plan known as Vision 2020 that placed human resources development and knowledge-based economy as the second most important pillar after good governance and capable state. This gave me a clear understanding of the great expectation that the country’s leadership had placed on education, science and technology and the task that awaited me.

President Kagame had been elected for the first time in 2000, and after I accepted the position, I had a brief meeting with him. I did not say much but listened closely. He told me how important education was – not just for students, but for the people of Rwanda and the strength of the country. He emphasized the importance of science and science education. After this meeting, I realized that his commitment to education was not only intellectual, but also deeply heartfelt.

6 A holistic approach to education

Countries like the United States or Japan have had decades to develop a successful culture of innovation, including everything from primary schools to patent law and research funding agencies. As time passes and conditions change, the culture can evolve. But when a nation is all but destroyed, and it has limited resources, evolution is not an option. It must quickly build its culture of innovation from the ground up. In post-genocide Rwanda, building the innovation culture had to begin with building the strength of the people.

Rwanda’s development shall ultimately depend on the development of our human resource base and that of the people, with whom we share our destiny. We will continue to invest in our people and we will strive to open up the frontiers of science, technology and research as we broaden our trade links with our neighbouring countries and beyond,^[3]

Kagame said in 2005.

For every goal Rwanda set in the post-genocide years, education, science and technology were crucial in the equation of success. They were the infrastructure needed for progress. If applied with the proper focus, they could build the skill and productivity of our people. That would, in turn, help Rwanda raise income and reduce poverty and, over time, help the nation to realize its full potential.

An important principle governed our work: Building a knowledge economy starts with an orientation, a basic understanding of how things are interrelated. To encourage health, you conduct a communication and education campaign about washing your hands, or the risks of spitting in the street. To improve the value of the nation’s coffee crop, farmers may need education programmes on washing, drying and grading the beans (USAID Policy Brief 2012). To create the workforce needed for a century of science and technology, the nation needs both strong PhD programmes and excellent technical and vocational schools.

But you must also begin to prepare students at the earliest age. Therefore, to build a knowledge economy, it is essential to have safe, healthy toilets for students in the first grade. You need advanced technology, from classroom computers to fibre-optic technology that links to the high-speed global telecommunications network. And it is important to have global partners to provide knowledge and support.

Consider, for example, that Rwanda lacks energy resources. About 85 % of its energy consumption was based on biomass – wood and charcoal, mostly – and 99 % of all households used biomass for cooking (Energypedia.info). Clearly, this is rapidly undermining our forests, leading to severe soil erosion and other problems. To address this challenge, in 2005 a plan (Murenzi 2006) was developed to equip schools with biodigesters that could convert human waste into energy. Not only would this save trees – it could help to solve the schools’ sanitation problems, and at the same time help students and teachers to develop technical and scientific skills.

An immediate need in the post-genocide years was the construction of school buildings and facilities. As I began my work as government minister, many of our schools were not up to standard. Most of them were built with mud bricks, and there was a risk that during a hard rain, schools could collapse on the students and teachers. The pit latrines were often hazardous.

I remember preparing to attend the opening of the university’s Centre for Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing, (ESRI 2000) with Clare Richardson, president and CEO of Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. I was informed at the ministry that a pit latrine had collapsed at a school. This was the challenge: Even as we achieved milestones in our development, it was just as important to assure that roofs were sound and latrines were safe at hundreds of community schools. This event made me understand that school safety should and must part of the overall education policy (Yisa et al. 2006).

We visited many schools in those times, and we developed important international partnerships to help us with repair and new construction – the World Bank and the African Development Bank, the Belgian Development Cooperation agency, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands. Rwanda was fortunate to have such friends.

Of course, rebuilding education in Rwanda was not as simple as replacing roofs or hiring teachers. It had to be a comprehensive, systematic effort to build and structure an educational system that could serve the country’s goal of developing a knowledge economy and a prosperous middle class. Certainly, this required vision; it required funding and human energy. But to bring all of these into focus, the effort required policy. In Rwanda, education is a cornerstone of policy. The United States Constitution is a document respected in much of the world, and it has provided the framework for the growth and development of a very prosperous nation. But nowhere in the document will you find the word ‘education’. The 2003 Rwandan constitution, on the other hand, sets education as one of the nation’s fundamental interests:

Article 40: Every person has the right to education. Freedom of learning and teaching shall be guaranteed in accordance with conditions determined by law. Primary education is compulsory. It is free in public schools.

In Rwanda, access to education is a fundamental human right (Murenzi and Rutayisire 2006).

Between 1998 and 1999, even before the Rwandan Constitution was approved, a national dialogue was underway that would produce “Vision 2020”, a comprehensive plan for the nation’s sustainable, more self-reliant future. Education (and human resources development in general) is mentioned in the first lines of President Kagame’s introduction; in the document itself, education is listed as one of the pillars of the nation’s future.

“Vision 2020” was important because it recognized that education, science and technology would provide the underpinning for many of the nation’s most ambitious goals, across diverse sectors such as agriculture, energy, health and business. More specifically, it committed Rwanda to achieving “universal education for all”, one of the most important Millennium Development Goals. It acknowledged that the government would need to organise intensive training initiatives to build the skills of schoolteachers. The plan also set as a priority vocational and technical training in the fields of engineering and technology.

In subsequent years, the government has conducted studies and implemented policies that have reflected Rwanda’s commitment to education across a range of topics: girls’ education; HIV-AIDS education; education for children with special needs; the role of education in industrial development; and the role of school sports in education and health.

But there are a handful of policy initiatives that illustrate both the innovative approach the government was taking toward education and the ambitions of our efforts.

The Sector-Wide Approach to education. In 2003, the Ministry of Education issued its “Education Sector Policy” which underscored the holistic approach to education at every level. The policy embraced the “Sector Wide Approach”, a concept that was then coming to the forefront in global development efforts. By seeing and evaluating the broad field of challenges, available resources and potential solutions within the sector of education, the sector-wide approach is a means of developing holistic policy.

To implement this approach, the Ministry held every year a joint review of the educational sector that brought together all relevant parties involved in Rwandan education: parents; school officials and teachers; government at the national, regional and local levels; the private sector; and external partners, including funding agencies. This would help the nation to use limited resources efficiently and effectively, with assurances for close monitoring and evaluation.

Concisely, in 25 pages, the 2003 policy paper outlined the context for Rwandan education, the goals, and the route by which it would achieve them.

But to be fully holistic, the plan also included an ethical dimension among its principal education objectives: “To contribute to the promotion of a culture of peace and to emphasise Rwandese and universal values of justice, peace, tolerance, respect for human rights, gender equality, solidarity and democracy.”

In intervening years, the Education Sector Strategic Plan has been frequently updated (Rwanda Ministry of Education 2010). The 2010–2015 sector plan, for example, cited the close link between the education and the government poverty-reduction efforts. In addition, it sought to reduce dropout and grade-repetition rates; tie education more firmly to labour market needs; and strengthen education in science and technology.

The annual joint review of the educational sector continues to this day.

The Nine-Years Basic Education initiative. This policy, a major pledge of the 2003 elections, was inaugurated in 2009. It mandates nine years of free education for all Rwandan children – six years of primary education and three years of secondary school. The policy expresses a fundamental need for Rwanda’s development, but it also was an expression of confidence that resources and energy could be mobilized quickly to increase access to education and improve the quality of schooling. The policy called for reduced class sizes, curriculum changes and improving teacher training and teacher specialization. In addition, Rwanda began exploring a new programme of school management (The Flemish Office for Development Cooperation and Technical Assistance (VVOB)).

Most importantly, the initiative required an expedited construction program. Under the Nine-Years Basic Education fast-tracking strategy, 8,000 classrooms and 20,000 latrine cubicles were built between 2009 and 2012 (Rwanda Ministry of Education 2012). The construction programme was largely implemented at the community level, with parents and others coming together to build the schools that their children, and their neighbours’ children, would attend. This community approach to building classrooms has continued and more than 22,505 classrooms were recently constructed through a “Home Grown School Construction Approach” for construction of schools in a bid to curb overcrowding and long distances travelled by students going and returning from schools.

Information and Communications Technology (ICT). As the recovery from genocide gained momentum in the late 1990s, government and education leaders began to recognize that computers and other technology could prove essential to the future of education and economic development.

At the 8th African Union summit on “Science, Technology and Research for Africa’s Development” in 2007, President Kagame talked about applying science and technology “holistically”, at all levels and in all sectors. “Historically,” he said, “whether one considers the role played by indigenous technologies in Africa, or the 19th century industrial revolution that transformed Europe and North America, or contemporary Asian experiences – it has been all about using scientific and technological applications to achieve fundamental socio-economic transformation (Murenzi).”

The government had initiated a process in 2004 to develop Rwanda’s comprehensive science and technology policy (Murenzi and Hughes 2005, 2007). For the next two years, a series of events were held to explore the countries needs and options, with the support of international partners such as UNESCO, United Nations University, the World Bank and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, along with top government representatives from Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Tanzania, Uganda and the United States.

The Republic of Rwanda Policy on Science, Technology and Innovation (United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies and the Republic of Rwanda’s Ministry of Science and Technology and Scientific Research 2006), published in August 2006, set four overarching objectives: to support a) economic growth, b) growth in rural areas and c) education, and to d) integrate technical education with the private sector. It was a framework in which science and technology would be incorporated in every sector, from farming to business, including health, energy, the environment and even the development of ecotourism. But education was central: science and technology would be injected into every level of the education system, from preschool to PhD studies.

As early as 2000, ICT in education had been established as a pillar of Rwanda’s National Information and Communications Infrastructure (NICI) policy. NICI set dozens of goals for using ICT to improve education and other fields to enhance the nation’s economic growth. The NICI plan included strategies such as developing the institutions needed to oversee the ICT sector, developing world-class IT infrastructure, ICT training for teachers, professional training and certification programs for the ICT workforce, and the development of e-learning projects and digital libraries for educational institutions and the public. The final phase (5 years) of the NICI plan evolved into the SMART Rwanda Master Plan (SRMP) with the overarching goal of transforming Rwanda into a knowledge-based economy (Ministry of Youth and ICT (MYICT) 2015).

The government’s enormously successful joint project with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme fit this framework perfectly.

OLPC was one of the innovative projects in basic education that aims at enhancing education through the introduction of technology in primary schools. The project uses the XO laptop which is a potent learning tool designed and built especially for children. It has enabled students to learn by doing through graphically rich, animated, interactive digital courses and gaming. Through partnerships with international organisations and events such as Scratch Day, Rwandan students are truly becoming global citizens at an early age. Pupils from primary four to six and various educators in the country join on an international network of other learners, teachers and enthusiasts who use the Scratch programming platform. The Government of Rwanda, through the Ministry of Education, has been distributing OLPC laptops to primary school students in Rwanda since 2009. The current laptop deployment currently stands at over 274,056 laptops in 1618 schools across the country.

Rwanda Vision 2020 aimed at moving Rwanda from “an agriculture-based economy to a knowledge-based society” and a middle-income country by 2020. The use of ICT in education was considered an important strategy for achieving this transformation. This is also in line with the strategic goal of the Education Sector Strategic Plan to strengthen the relevance of education and training to the labour market including the insertion of 21st century skills. The Smart Classroom is able to bring 21st century education systems to Rwanda, through the inclusion of new, relevant and ICT based technologies. The Smart Classroom is available for primary and secondary schools, allowing for smooth integration of teaching and learning at all levels. 1,081 smart classrooms have been set up in schools across the country to improve the quality of teaching and learning.

But where OLPC took the one-by-one view, concentrating on each child’s access to the Internet, the government also was moving to link the nation into the growing global network of fibre-optic cable system.

By 2004-5, an initiative overseen by the Ministry of Education had laid fibre optic cable linking Kigali and Butare (Kwibuka 2007), an effort to give scholars, students, government workers and others access to high-speed Internet. A few years later, after substantial investments, Rwanda connected to the new Eastern Africa Submarine System, a fibre-optic undersea cable system that links the region with the rest of the world (MTN Rwanda 2010).

Rwanda has completed the “National Backbone” network, which uses East African Submarine System to provide connectivity and bandwidth throughout the country. The network links more than 300 institutions – including educational institutions – nationwide. A 4G LTE network was overlaid on top of the fibre optic network which provides access to high-speed broadband internet across the whole of Rwanda. A SMART Education network is currently being installed to connect schools, colleges and universities across the country to a high-speed fibre optic educational network.

7 Hard work, hard-won results

On 24 July 2014, 22 students joined in Kigali for a special ceremony: They were the first class of graduates from Carnegie Mellon University in Rwanda, with master’s degrees in information technology. It was an important day for the students – they herald a new generation of high-skill African IT experts, trained in Africa and prepared to meet the needs of an emerging continent. That made the day a milestone for Rwanda, too, and for Africa. For Carnegie Mellon, the prestigious U.S.-based research university, the ceremony validated its commitment to build technical skills that can support economic development in East Africa.

“Creating a long-term education programme is critical,” said Bruce Krogh, the university’s inaugural director, “because it gives students time to analyse problems and develop solutions in the context in which they occur.”

The effort to rebuild Rwanda’s education system began almost immediately after the genocide was stopped. For the past 30 years, Rwandan communities, the government and overseas partners have recognized that without education, we cannot achieve strong, sustained economic progress. They have invested hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours of work. They have developed and implemented ambitious policies to improve the schools so that Rwandans can build the knowledge economy.

By many measures, the nation has come such a long way – it is a story of extraordinary commitment by millions of people, from the youngest students and their parents to the most experienced teachers and government policy and law makers.

Consider literacy, a simple but powerful overall metric of the success of the educational system in a Least Developed Country. In 1978, UNESCO reports, Rwanda’s literacy rate was 38 % – roughly two of every three people could not read. By 1991, a few years before the genocide, it was 58 %. It was 71 % in 2010, and by 2014 had reached 84 % for those aged 15 to 24 (UNESCO 2014).

Today, the Rwandan education system serves about 5 million students, out of a total population of some 13.2 million (2022 Population and Housing Census). The system includes 4,051 early childhood institutions, some 3,932 primary schools, 1,977 secondary schools, 40 colleges and universities, 470 Technical and vocational training centres, and about 5,000 (Ministry of Education and Key Statistics for 2022/2023) literacy centres. These institutions, all together, have a staff nearing 138,038 (Ministry of Education Key Statistics for 2022/2023).

The enrollment in primary education has increased significantly from the level just prior to the genocide, reaching more than 2.8 million students in 2023. Among girls, 93.9 % of eligible primary school students are enrolled, with 94.8 % of boys.

Universal access to high-quality education is one of the key priorities of Rwanda’s “Vision 2050”. Priority 4 of the Social Transformation pillar of the National Strategy for Transformation 1 (NST-1) focuses on granting access to quality education, including at pre-primary level. Rwanda has sustained near universal access to primary education and gender parity in basic education for over a decade (UNICEF Rwanda 2024).

Much of this rapid progress is credited to the Nine-Years Basic Education initiative, which has been so successful that in 2012, the government extended compulsory education to 12 years (Rwirahira 2012).

On the basis of that strategy, Rwanda in the same year won the Commonwealth Education Good Practice Award. “Beyond the expansion of access to education,” the judges said, the policy “represented a qualitative shift in the dynamics of schooling and made a major contribution to national reconciliation (Rwanda project wins Commonwealth education award 2012).”

While preventing primary school dropouts remains a significant challenge, the government has pursued a range of innovative programs to keep young students in school: as of 2024, almost all public primary schools have food programmes and even school gardens. Some provide de-worming treatments and/ or include HIV/AIDS prevention in the curriculum (Rwanda Ministry of Education 2010).

Secondary schools, too, have shown dramatic growth. From around 50,000 students at the time of the genocide, enrollment reached 288,000 in 2008 and then 729,000 in 2023 – a more than 14-fold increase. The enrollment of high-school aged students in secondary schools doubled between 2008 and 2012, from 13.9 % to 26.4 % (UNESCO 2014).

The number of technical vocational schools also has increased substantially in recent years, providing a critically important source of trained, skilled workforce.

Just as primary and secondary education is achieving ambitious goals, we’re also seeing rapid change and advance in Rwandan higher education. We can measure it in numbers: Higher education enrollment has increased from 3,000 at the end of the genocide to more than 106,000 in 2023, an increase of more than 35 times.

The decision to merge seven public universities into one new University of Rwanda in 2013 was carried out to create significant efficiencies within the university system, while giving the university higher visibility and greater influence and to focus on creating a research-led institution. In the November 2024 issue of Times Higher Education, University of Rwanda ranks 6th in the Sub-Saharan Africa reflecting progress in teaching, research and societal impact, fruits of the merger.

Overseas scholars and universities are also deepening their engagement with Rwanda, and this should be seen as a strong vote of confidence in the nation’s potential – and as an opportunity to build skills in science, engineering and other fields.

Carnegie Mellon is just one of the globally respected partners to make a commitment to Rwanda’s future. Many others – including Oklahoma Christian University, located just outside thriving Oklahoma City in the United States, Fonds de Research of Quebec, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), NTU of Singapore, Kent State University in the United States – provide scholarships to top Rwandan students in fields such as engineering, business and advanced IT programmes such as artificial intelligence and data science.

Rwanda and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) worked together to build a global climate observatory in Rwanda to assess climate change and measure greenhouse gases associated with change. This project is the fruit of discussions in 2008–2009 between President Kagame, his ministers, and the MIT administration. Initially the observatory was run by international experts and is now run by local researchers. The climate observatory is a part of the multinational Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment led by MIT, whereby Rwandan scientists plug into an important global research network with decades of experience in climate studies (MIT News Office 2014).

The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), based in Trieste, Italy, is an influential global research centre for scientists from the developing world. Under the leadership of its Guatemalan physicist Fernando Quevedo, then its director, ICTP opened a branch in Rwanda that serves as a science hub for all of Africa. The branch offers master’s degrees and PhDs in advanced theoretical physics including high energy, condensed matter and geophysics.

Rwanda has joined with regional and global partners – including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (Lempinen 2011) and the World Bank (Lempinen 2014) – to host and help organize science diplomacy conferences that sought constructive solutions to the challenges of higher education in East and Central Africa and the wider continent.

In order to support the ambitions of the University of Rwanda and the many private higher learning institutions to become research-based and to increase their teaching and research capability, the government of Rwanda embarked on a programme to develop Centres of Excellence. Rwanda committed to take part in the World Bank Eastern and Southern Africa Higher Education Centres of Excellence (ACE II) project which is designed to contribute to the development of the critically needed skills to address regional challenges and contribute to national and regional socioeconomic development. Four of these centres were established in Rwanda: African Centre of Excellence in Internet of Things; African Centre of Excellence in Energy for Sustainable Development; African Centre of Excellence for Data Sciences; and African Centre of Excellence in Innovative Teaching and Learning Mathematics and Science.

A Centre of Excellence in Biodiversity & Natural Resources Management has been established, with the support of UNESCO and the One-UN Fund, to provide knowledge-based approaches for sustainable management of the wealth of biodiversity and natural resources in the Albertine Rift region, and a regional Centre of Excellence in Health Supply Chain Management was endorsed by the EAC Sectoral Council of Ministers of Health as a teaching institution in Rwanda with partner collaborating institutions in the EAC with a vision to “to protect and improve the health of the population of the EAC partner states.” With the support of the African Development Bank, a Centre of Excellence in Biomedical Engineering and e-Health was established.

These centres of excellences attract students from all over Africa and have already produced hundreds master’s and PhD graduates who are contributing to the development of their respective countries.

8 The essential role of communication technology

Advances in communication technology can provide important support to Rwandan education, and here there is much hopeful news.

While the civil war and genocide knocked out most of Rwanda’s 8,000 telephone lines, by 1998, the network was up to about 26,000 phones. But by the turn of the 21st century, an ambitious effort was underway to digitize telephone communication, with special attention to rural parts of the country (Government of Rwanda).

Now jump ahead to September 2023: The Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Agency reported 12.5 million mobile phones in the nation (RURA 2023) – nearly 100 % of the population.

Clearly, experts say, the advances in Rwanda’s technology at every level are helping to improve the business climate. In the World Bank’s 2019 “Ease of Doing Business” rankings, Rwanda came in at 38th place out of 190 countries surveyed – second among all African nations. It was 52nd in 2013. And in 2009 it had ranked 143rd (World Bank).

9 Women and men of the new Rwanda

The conclusion is clear: Over the past 31 years, a new reality has emerged in Rwanda. Education, science and technological advancement are driving economic growth and rising levels of prosperity. There are new opportunities, and a broad new sense of hope. In this environment, reconciliation and peace find fertile soil.

The tourism and hospitality sector has been growing in Rwanda and has emerged as a key contributor to the country’s economic growth, job generation and development trajectory. Recognized for its stunning landscapes, diverse wildlife and vibrant culture, Rwanda has increasingly positioned itself as a prime tourist destination in East Africa. For the last five years, Kigali has maintained 2nd position as preferred city in Africa after Cape Town on the International Congress and Conventions Association rankings. All this could not have been achieved without skilled workforce. According to the Rwanda Development Board (2021), the sector employed more than 164,000 people in 2020 with different education and skill levels.

With this growth, there has been a concerted effort to bolster the labor force within the sector through training initiatives and educational programs. Universities and vocational institutions have been extremely important in equipping individuals with the necessary skills and knowledge to thrive in the industry. These initiatives aim not only to meet the growing demand for skilled professionals in tourism and hospitality, but also to empower local communities by providing them with opportunities for meaningful employment and economic development.

If we want to see the big picture – if we want to take the holistic approach – it must be acknowledged that Rwanda continues to face challenges, some of them very difficult. And one set of numbers, above all, represents the magnitude of the challenge: 21 % of Rwandan youth are unemployed. Of those employed, about 60 % are in jobs typically defined as low productivity or underemployed (Charo and Pryce 2022); 40 % lack the skills needed to enter the job market (OECD Publishing). In recognition of this, the 2018–2024 National Strategy for transformation targets to create 1.5M (214,000) decent and productive jobs and hence empower youth with the critically productive skills.

In a very real sense, that number is a measure of the overall health of the economy. And it tells us that, while Rwanda is making progress, there is much work to do – and many young lives at stake.

Four issues are of particular relevance to advancing quality in schools:

It is important to pay teachers more and train them more effectively. While Rwanda has made progress on this issue, some analysts have suggested that the rapid growth in the school system has required to hire teachers with insufficient credentials and to pay them too little. To achieve the best education, it is necessary to pay for it.

It is important to bring reliable electricity to all the schools, especially in rural areas. Having a strong science lab or a high-speed broadband connection to the Internet is difficult when your school doesn’t have electricity. This is a challenge of which Rwanda’s leaders are well aware, and much progress has been made, as evidenced by the fact that only 6 % of Rwandan homes had access to electricity in 2000 but this percentage has jumped to 75 % in 2023. But the progress must continue. Without it, the ability to educate and train future scientists and engineers in compromised.

It is important to make more use of Information and Communications Technology in communities and educational programmes. The International Telecommuncations Union 2022 estimates that 34 % of Rwandans use the Internet, that’s far below the world average of 67 %, with high income countries nearing 93 %. A science student who does not have regular access to the incredible libraries and laboratories available on the Web is at a deep disadvantage when compared to other students (International Telecommunication Union (ITU) 2023).

It is essential to produce more PhD scientists and engineers. Rwanda has made strong progress in enrolling young scientists and engineers into PhD studies, but more has to be done to provide them qualified instructors and adequate education and training facilities. Africa’s PhD deficit is profound. In the United States, there are 1,580 PhD scientists per million residents. In South Korea, there are nearly 1,200. But many African nations, including Rwanda, have fewer than 100 PhD scientists per million residents – and some have fewer than 20. That inevitably produces a science deficit, with Africa contributing only 2.3 % of the world’s peer-reviewed scientific research papers.

On these points, I must be clear: No nation can achieve them overnight, and the challenge is especially difficult for nations with limited resources. But if one is a little bit impatient, that is not a bad thing. Nations such as Brazil, China and India, in the span of 30 years, have transformed themselves. Like them, Rwanda will succeed if it continues to recognize that investment, hard work and political will can pay great dividends if sustained over years, and decades.

In fact, I believe that Rwanda is poised for continued progress and poised to emerge as a science and technology hub for Africa. The nation has leadership and vision and has shown that it has the know-how to set priorities, implement them with discipline and achieve goals. This work started in the most difficult circumstances that could be imagined, and the effort to build schools from the ashes of the genocide has required the greatest commitment, but the government has never wavered, and the people have never lost hope.

Today, a child who enters a school in Rwanda knows that, in spite of challenges, the system is fundamentally fair. That child knows: “If I work hard and do well in my studies, I will get to the next level.” The next level might be secondary school, university, post-graduate studies. Even a child from a poor family – that child can achieve miracles.

Rwanda itself is seen, globally, as something of a miracle story. Policymakers and journalists look at what the people, together, have accomplished, and they are impressed. Sometimes they are in awe. They point to tiny Rwanda, and they want to learn how it made these great achievements.

That is an honour, and Rwanda has a right to be proud. But more important than global reputation, more important than any statistic, is this fact:

Rwanda’s schools are a place where Rwandans join as a community, like a family home where all the brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and parents and grandparents come together to share a meal and to celebrate life together. And with great improvement in the schools, the nation’s education system has become a force for justice and peace in a way that can’t be measured.

In the time before the 1994 genocide, many people were illiterate. They had not developed critical thinking. So, if they were told by someone in power, “Go and kill somebody” they would do it – they would go kill somebody. But if people are educated, they are better able to assess what is good and what is bad. Those with open minds have access to both knowledge and human values.

One day, someone asked me: “Romain, are you a Hutu or a Tutsi?” And I said: “Why do you want to know that?” I held out my finger and said: “Take my blood, and go do a test, and then will you know who I am? If you can find this out from a blood test, as if I had malaria or AIDS, then please come back and tell me.”

What is central is not so-called ethnicity. It is a person’s work as a Rwandan. It is what he or she can contribute to the people and the country. This is a person’s true value. It is well captured in the now-celebrated concept of “Ndumunyarwanda”, which literally means “I am a Rwandan”.

One of the greatest achievements in the schools now is not something that would be considered academic performance. It is, instead, the values that teachers are teaching, and that students are learning.

So, in the curriculum today, there is peace education. When students are learning about language and grammar, whether the sentences are English, French or Kinyarwandan, the exercises can be structured not to impart hate, but to impart understanding and reconciliation. This way, they come to understand that the person in front of them is just like them, has blood like them, can suffer like them. Knowledge can give you this tolerance.

Teaching values has been a very important part of the educational programme in Rwandan schools and communities. When you teach values, you teach about hygiene. People are astonished that Kigali is so clean, but that is very important. You teach about health values, and so, just by washing hands or not spitting in the street, you are making a huge difference. You teach the value of respecting an adult. The value of an adult respecting children, and not abusing them. The value of considering other people as human beings. These values are Rwandan values. They are universal values.

For the past 31 years, through the efforts of parents, teachers, people in government and our partners all over the world, Rwanda has been teaching students both the skills that will help them make a living and the values that will guide them to be good members of the community. To build a nation, both of these are essential.