Education Tables
While
Rwanda’s gross primary school enrolment rate at 87% in 1998 compares
favourably with the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa, when one probes beneath the
surface a number of problems are revealed in the indicators of educational
outcomes.
First
and foremost, the quality of primary education is low. This is reflected by
the fact that the literacy rates of 52% for men and 45% for women in 1996 are
lower than the enrolment rates, suggesting that children are attending primary
school but not gaining functional literacy. It is also supported by the very
low examination success rate of 21% in 1998. This poor quality of primary
education may be related to a number of factors, including: lack of qualified
teachers (46% in 1998); lack of teaching materials; and a high number of
dropouts (only 24% of children finishing in 1998 completed the full 6 years of
primary education).
Secondly,
the numbers enrolling in secondary education are very low, at only 7% in 1998
(gross). This may be related to the poor number of primary school leavers
described above, combined with low transition rate of approximately 20%.
Although students find large number of teachers (a teacher/student
ratio of 22) only 31% of first cycle teachers were qualified in 1998, and
there is also a lack of teaching materials.
Thirdly,
given the large amount of young people entering the labour market, the need of
the nation’s youth for technical and vocational training is not being met.
Although high quality technical training is being provided by among others,
the new Kigali Institute for Science and Technology (KIST) and the National
University of Rwanda, there is little basic vocational training in rural areas
and for the informal sector. Furthermore, there is lack of correspondence
between teaching programmes and labour market needs.
And fourthly, there are large regional variations in
the education system. Umutara, Kibungo, Kigali rural and Kibuye are
marginalised in terms of enrolment rates, level of qualified teachers, and
number of schools. This is particularly serious given that their populations
have surged following the return of the new and old caseload refugees.
However,
there are some positive aspects to the education system. Despite the gender
differences on literacy rates for the whole population, these are eliminated
(and in fact slightly reversed) for younger age groups, representing a big
change in social attitudes to female education. And given the level of
devastation following the genocide, much valuable work has been done to get
the system back on its feet.
The Government is highly committed to tackling
the problem besetting the education system. Not only has it set ambitious
targets for primary school enrolment (95% by 2005), Secondary transition rates
(40% by 2005) and teaching quality (teaching qualification rates, and
materials provision), but it is making the necessary policy and expenditure
decisions to meet them. A new national syllabus and examination system is
being launched for both primary and secondary education, and the Ministry of
Education plans to introduce a student loans scheme to allow it to transfer
resources from tertiary education (towards a target of 64% for primary and for
tertiary). Furthermore although
starting from a very low base 2% GDP in 1997 (or Frw 10.8 billion), the
education budget saw a 46.7% nominal increase in the 1998 national budget to
2.5% of GDP (or Frw 15.9 billion).
