Education cy in these skill sets has been the main bottleneck preventing many Rwandans from accessing global opportunities . We have received almost 3,000 applicants from more than 350 different schools . During our recruitment , we got to meet 400 finalists for virtual interviews . We were amazed by the amount of talent and excellence distributed across the country , as we met students with passions and aspirations that transcend their personal gain . Our hope for Isomo is that we can help reinvent spaces for learning and language acquisition .
During my recent conversation with Maman Bitsinda , who has since retired , she told me about her tutoring efforts in her community . I was glad that , two decades later , she was still educating . She typifies an educator who understands the needs of her students and community . She was offering an alternative and supplementary pathway to learning , no matter how small . To realise the promise of learning , we need to create , for everyone , more pathways towards an education that will equip the learner with key skills and perspectives that will prepare them to lead healthy and productive lives . Learning avenues should be , ultimately , as diverse as human experience itself .
Chaste Niwe is Director of Academic Services at Bridge2Rwanda . He is a Rwandan national .
Africa ’ s Post-Colonial Education Conundrum
Moses Khisa
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1960 is considered the year of independence for Africa . More than a dozen states gained sovereign status in that year alone . The winds of change had gained irreversible force . Henceforth , it was a matter of when , not if , for the total independence of the entire continent .
So 1960 is the definitive baseline for where the continent stood and from where it was to forge forward . It is there where we have to start any analysis of Africa ’ s contemporary education trends and trajectories .
Of the student-age population in 1960 , a paltry 3 percent attended secondary school . No more than one-third had access to elementary education . Across the continent , on average , only one-sixth of the population was literate . Out of a population of more than 200 million Africans in 1960 , less than 10,000 had completed secondary schooling .
Arguably , Congo-Zaire , a country that has taken on such presumptuous names as “ The Congo Free State ” or the “ Democratic Republic of the Congo ”, best illustrated the dire state of Africa ’ s educational deficiencies after almost a century of the “ civilising ” rule of colonialism . Africa ’ s third-largest state , geographically , The Congo had no more than 30 university graduates . None of these was a medical doctor .
In Francophone Africa , the majority of colonial states had no university or degree-awarding college . In Anglophone , colleges were at best constituent units of a metropole university , in effect lacking independent existence . In 1960 , the total number of university graduates for the entire continent was only a couple of hundreds , most of them in a few Anglophone countries like Ghana and Nigeria .
As shocking as these figures are , the overarching and fundamental problem was not so much the minuscule numbers of Africans with access to education as the nature and mission of the training they received . At its core , the mission of colonial education was not to serve the learning needs of the colonised ; it was to service the interests of the colonialists .
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