The education sector drive in ICT is on course. This was revealed by the Director of ICT at the Ministry of Education, Eugène Karangwa during an exclusive interview.

According to Karangwa, the education sector has embarked on vigorous strategies to ensure that it goes digital as a way of fitting into the government’s vision of integrating Information Communication Technology (ICT) in the economy to improve people’s lives.

Networking and liaising with ICT heavy weight companies like Microsoft, Cisco, AMD and others, to help in stepping up the sector’s ICT potential to successfully use it for academic excellence, are among the moves taken.

Karangwa, said that through the Global Educational Alliance meeting that has just been held in Rwanda, Microsoft, Cisco, AMD and other ICT companies pledged their technical and professional support to Rwanda’s educational sector in its move to go digital.

He further revealed that they came to Rwanda with an objective of reviewing the sector’s education plan in the area of ICT in order to establish how to best help uplift her ICT programs.

"They evaluated and found out that ICT can be successfully incorporated in our educational sector. We shared with them our priorities and they agreed to help us achieve our goals,” added Karangwa.

The sector has set ICT related priorities which include deployment of ICT infrastructure in Rwandan schools; development of ICT in the educational policy, building ICT-based teaching, learning and training, among others.

Also in the pipeline is the open learning exchange, a digital program where learning materials are digitalized and put on the internet so that everyone wherever they are can access the learning materials.

In an earlier interview, the Minister of State for Primary and Secondary education, Théoneste Mutsindashaka, revealed that the ministry had sent for digitalized materials from India to be used in the pilot study.

Implementations of this year’s Global Educational Alliance programme is set to begin in September, starting with policy formulation which will guide the programs.   

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