Rwanda Education Board (Reb) has said it is following up on cases of complicity in the mismanagement of One-Laptop-per-Child (OLPC) programme.

This follows the Auditor-General’s spotlight on the project as the audit reports for 2012/2013 were released this week. 

The Auditor-General, while presenting the report on expenditure of state finances for the year 2012-13, said 528 laptops were reported missing from different schools, while in some instances, the laptops have been kept in their seals ever since they were received. 

Nkubito Bakuramutsa, the in-charge of the OLPC programme in Reb, said they had measures in place to ensure the laptops, which are meant to benefit pupils in primary schools.

"All laptops in country are equipped with a security feature that will disable the laptops after some time if the laptop is taken away from the designated school. There therefore, must be complicity of school management in most theft,” Bakuramutsa told The New Times.

Nyagatare District in Eastern Province and Gicumbi District in Northern Province were reported with the biggest number of laptops stolen, or "missing” or damaged, with 133 and 121 laptops involved respectively.

At GS Cyabayaga, a primary school from Mimuri Sector in Nyagatare, 699 laptops were distributed to Primary Four to Six pupils. But last year, 61 of the laptops were stolen. 

Celestin Dusabe, the school principal, said thieves broke into the school "twice last year and stole our laptops.”

"The first time we discovered that two of our guards had broken in through the window and stole 32 laptops and they were arrested,” Dusabe said. 

The principal said the second time, thieves improvised a long stick with a hook with which they used a broken window to pull the laptops out of the store, taking 30 gadgets.  

"So far, we have managed to recover two laptops,” he added.

Bakuramutsa said any time computers are stolen; they identify the responsible people and hold them accountable. 

He cited a case of the director of studies in GS Nyundo in Gakenke district who was arrested over theft of the laptops and a number of cases (including Cyabayaga) under investigation.

Idle laptops 

In some schools, the Auditor-General established that the computers were not in use, rather, kept in boxes. 

Some school directors dismissed the AG’s report, saying sometimes the laptops shut down and have to be brought to Reb from where they are decoded, a process that they said "may take a week.” 

"At such time, we keep the computers in the store and people may think that they are not in use,” said Muronsi Sebagabo, the director of GS Gakirage in Nyagatare District, whose school was given 1,002 laptops in 2011. 

Other issues related to Internet in the schools, mismatch of the laptops and the number of students was identified in the AG’s report. 

Reb’s target is to give out a laptop to each pupil (from Primary Four to Six) in 2,334 schools by 2017, but the Auditor-General said the record is low. 

The idleness of scholastic materials also affects school books Reb gives to public schools. 

Some schools keep them in shelves instead of giving them out to students. 

"For us we found that we cannot give out books to take home because students end up stealing them. They read from the school library,” said Dusabe, the Cyabayaga school principal. 

The Auditor-General also faulted some schools for acquiring textbooks they do not need.