They walked towards the graduation tents. Heads held high, chests puffed out, proud to finally be done with those treacherous years of studying and ready to face the world with the acquired hands on skills.

As the ceremony began, I watched as the graduates confidently took their seats and by the look on their faces, one could see that over the final years, these students have matured and grown in ways never thought possible. It’s evident that they have dreams and goals to accomplish.

Best graduation speeches have become outlets for sharing some of the most important life lessons ever of all time. 

I think the schools have always picked better inspirational speakers because the most important inspiration anyone can ever get is someone who his living by example. 

The 5th IPRC Kigali’s graduation that took place on the 25th of February 2016 and saw 523 students graduating from different faculties was no different as speeches of wisdom that are applicable to anyone in any time, beyond just graduating students were delivered at the ceremony.

While making his speech, the guest of honor, Minister of Education Dr. Papias Musafiri Malimba, called upon students to always believe in themselves and to try to be job creators other than job seekers.

The speeches encouraged students to overcame resistances from everyone and achieved their dreams, one after another, by first having that crystal clear vision of what they wanted, then going all out to achieve them. 

He also noted that this particular graduation though 5th in its nature for IPRC Kigali is different from the others and will help change the perception people have on TVET mainly because the best performing student is a girl. 

She’s living proof of how one can overcome all odds to achieve one’s dreams, as long as you set your heart and mind to it. Truly, there’s no such thing as "can’t be done”. If you really want to achieve your dreams, they will be yours for the taking.

"This big number of new graduates helps to fulfill the mission of WDA that puts emphasis on promoting, facilitating, and guiding the development and upgrading of skills and competencies of the national workforce in order to enhance competitiveness and employability”.

Among the 523, 256 are from Civil Engineering, 85 in Mechanical Engineering, 102 in Electrical and Electronics, 50 in ICT and 30 in Mining Engineering (first promotion). However, the number of female students is still low, among the yesterday graduands, only 17% are female.

Why TVET 

The Government of Rwanda is committed to investing in the development of human resources in order to meet the major objective of Vision 2020 which is to create a knowledge-based and technology-led economy.

Comprehensive human resources development is considered to be one of the necessary pillars to reach the status of a middle income country (US$220 Gross Domestic Product-GDP/capita in 2003 to US$900 GDP/capita) by 2020.

Rwanda’s economy is characterized by a serious lack of qualified people in the workforce, particularly in the technical sectors. The goal of education and TVET is therefore to fight ignorance and illiteracy so as to produce competent human resources for economic and social development. 

To address the critical shortage of qualified technical and vocational manpower in the labour market, there is a need to link TVET policy with employment and other sectors’ development policies. 

TVET graduates to get funding

According to the Director General of WDA, Jerome Gasana, there is a new government program for students that graduate through TVET on how they can get funding from banks to startup kits for their own businesses and that students have already been advised to take up this opportunity.

"This financial year 2015-2016, students who have finalized through TVET can organize themselves into an association and take their project to BDF and get funding” Gasana said.

At the moment, other institution likes MINICOM and the Ministry of commerce is working together with WDA and NCBS to come up with ways of helping these students to enhance their carriers.

IPRC Kigali growing over the years

The main objective of IPRC Kigali is to ensure that we produce graduates who will actually be in position not only to create jobs for themselves, but also create employment opportunities to fight unemployment.

From its inception back then in 2008 to now, IPRC Kigali has evolved amazingly in all sectors both in the quality of education and the fiscal structures at the campus and has passed out 1941 students.

According to the Principal IPRC-Kigali Eng. Diogene Mulindahabi, the institution has grown in bounds and size to a level that is amazing today.

"We started with very few equipment and facilities hardly enough for the number of students that they had then. But today have aquired equipment, thanks to the Government’s will and that of the partners, we have become an institution that is churning out not only a big number of laborers but qualified graduates with competent skills needed for the Rwandan labour market” he says.

After leaving, the graduates find it easy to compete for jobs on the labour market because of the quality of skills that they acquired here. we are always in constant touch with the members of the private sector for consultations of what is required in the labour market and this actually helps us in coming up with programmes to respond to the needs in the labour market.

At IPRC-Kigali, we keep coming up with courses by tracking the labour market demands. Our approach on this has been that we developed or designed a programme that enables us to keep our staff upgrading so that they build on their skills and also get the latest of information not only within but also outside the country so that they can be able to train our students considering the changes in the industry or market.

This actually goes hand-in-hand with curriculum development whereby we ensure that private sector players are consulted; and their input will mainly rotate around new developments to either include or drop what is not necessary in the curriculum.

The support that we get from Korea Internal Cooperation Agency (KOICA) in TVET has helped IPRC Kigali to excel and improve its faculties.

We are also grateful to the many industries that have provided jobs to our graduates.

Gender at IPRC Kigali

The principal says that in 2008, the number of girls enrolled in TVET was really small and this was because of the perception that girls are not meant for TVET. However, the number has been increasing overtime, it stands at 20 per cent from the 3 percent when we had just started. This simply means that we have managed to make a 17 per cent increase.

Today, our best performing student is a girl and this confirms the fact that vocational and technical education should not be considered a domain for boys only, girls who have taken up the various technical courses are performing better. 

We are therefore engaged in campaigns to educate the public of how possible it is for girls to take on vocational education.