Minister of Education, Eugene Mutimura speaks at National Dialogue Council-Umushyikirano 2019
The Ministry of Education has made two crucial promises that could positively change lives of thousands of students .
The ministry pledged to build 416 Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) centres or simply, one TVET school in every sector of the country.
The promise was made during the National Dialogue council─Umushyikirano that has just concluded.
Construction of TVET is in line with the government’s policy of encouraging students completing Senior 3 to join technical schools, in a bid to fight biting issues of youth unemployment in the country.
According to National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR) in 2017, Unemployment among Rwandans who completed upper secondary was the highest at 23%, followed by the unemployment among graduates of tertiary education with 18%.
The government believes that the unemployment rate can be defied by enrolling many students into TVET schools.
The Ministry Of Education promise came after Bweyeye sector in Rusizi district, western province representative in Umushyikirano requested for TVET in the area.
“We shall establish a TVET in each sector of the country,”Eugene Mutimura, Minister of Education said.
“We have not yet achieved targets of having a TVET school in every sector, so far we have 400 in the country, but among them, some are privately owned.”
Going by this year’s figures, the government finished construction of 14 standard TVET schools after securing $81million (about Rwf69billion) loan from the Indian government.
These schools were constructed in Nyarugenge, Gatsibo, Kayonza, Rwamagana, Kirehe and Nyagatare districts, to mention but a few.
The Minister of Education also said that his ministry is extending laptops to visually impaired students.
At Ameki color factory. The Ministry said it will build a TVET school in every sector entity of Rwanda
Mutimura said that already, they are in talks with their partner – the United Nations International Childrens’ Fund (UNICEF) to extend laptops and Braille to students, in a bid to improve inclusive education.
Braille is a tangible writing system used by visually impaired, it is traditionally written with embossed paper using perkins Braille machine with a key corresponding to each other of the six dots of the Braille code, a space, key and a line space key.
At national dialogue, the visually impaired students said that there was inadequate reading material in schools.
This challenge affects students who are visually impaired in their process of learning.
Negotiations to engage publishers to grant copyright or supply some books to help the blind are underway, according to ministry of education.
According to a report from World Health Organisation in 2012, one of every 100 people in Rwanda is visually impaired. The current number of visually impaired people is about 400,000.
