The government is seeking to increase its Budgetary Allocation to the education sector to at least 20 per cent of the National Budget to fund the ever-growing needs of the education system as well as meet set targets, Education minister Silas Lwakabamba has said.

Prof. Lwakabamba was commenting on the resolutions and recommendations adopted following the three-day Unesco-Africa regional conference in Kigali, yesterday.

The conference brought together ministers and other education officials from 44 African countries and other global actors in education to discuss issues, challenges and priorities for education post-2015.

It recommended that sub-Saharan countries increase their budget allocations to at least 20 per cent of their annual budget to boost their chances of achieving the final targets for education post-2015 Millennium Development Goals.

Lwakabamba said in Rwanda’s case, increasing the budget will not be much of a task as it has one of the highest allocations in the continent, currently at 18 per cent.

More than Rwf300 billion was allocated to the sector this financial year.

Prof. Lwakabamba said the revision of the Budget Allocation will go into dealing with the increasing number of students as well as emerging challenges. 

"We certainly need more resources to respond to all the needs but the level at which we are is quite commendable, there is every intention to go higher. We are dealing with big numbers of students; we have about 2.5 million students in primary education, 600,000 in secondary education and about 87,000 in higher education, bringing the total to more than 3 million,” Lwakabamba said.

Among the areas where attention is required, he noted, include the rollout of early childhood education, which was still low, at 17 per cent, and the transition from primary to secondary education.

"Another problem is the needed support through the Ubudehe social stratification programme for poor students going to higher education,” the minister said.

Lwakabamba added that, from the forum, Rwanda will conduct follow-ups from other African nations that have had success stories in various aspects of education such as scholarships and student loans and seek to learn from best practices.

The call to increase the percentage of Budget Allocation to education had earlier this week been made by former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, currently the chairperson of the Global Partnership for Education, at the conference.

Global Partnership for Education is a multi-national endeavour working with 60 developing nations to enable all children including the poorest and most marginalised to attend school and receive a quality education.

Noting that Rwanda was one of the few countries that came close to achieving the threshold, Gillard said increasing the allocation would facilitate provision of education for all.

"These funding efforts are clearly visible in what Rwanda has managed to achieve over the past years in the field of education,” she said in a previous interview with this newspaper.

Youth inclusion

The forum also saw the youth call for more inclusion in the post-2015 education agenda.

Speaking to The New Times on the sidelines of the conference, Darice Rusagara, the Diaspora coordinator for the Pan-African Youth Network for culture and peace, called for youth involvement in consultations in the agenda of education post-2015.

Rusagara said it was the only way education would be made dynamic as its recipients (the youth) were.

The conference also highlighted the importance of considering other sectors that affect the goals of universal and inclusive education.

Jozef Maerien, the UN Fund for Population Activities country representative, said to achieve the desired goals and progress in education provision, it was necessary to give attention to other related issues such as health, employment, gender-based violence, as they were all intertwined.

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