President Paul Kagame yesterday met the Carnegie Mellon president Subra Suresh who paid him a courtesy call at Village Urugwiro in Kigali.

Suresh said that following the success of their four years in Rwanda he discussed at length with the President on how to step up the partnership for greater impact.

"We just marked four years in Rwanda with the recent graduation of the third batch of students in the masters programme. We discussed extensively on how the programme has fared so far and how we can strengthen the collaboration,” Suresh said.

Carnegie Mellon University Rwanda on Monday this week held their third graduation which saw 24 students feted with master’s degrees in Information Technology, Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The graduation brought the tally of students who have graduated from the internationally acclaimed institution to 70.

Suresh noted that their newly forged partnership with The MasterCard Foundation would benefit more learners from Rwanda and the region consequently serving the nation’s ambitions to become a knowledge based society.

"We made a major announcement on Monday on our partnership with the MasterCard Foundation that will benefit learners from Sub-Saharan Africa with at least 40 per cent coming from Rwanda for the next seven years benefiting over 125 students,” he said.

The partnership, that targets ‘talented but economically disadvantaged’ scholars from sub-Saharan Africa, will take in the first batch of students beginning this year.

"It is a relatively small programme but we already have students from not just Rwanda but Uganda and Kenya as well. The MasterCard Foundation scholarships we will not only benefit Rwanda and Carnegie Mellon but the region as a whole,” he added.

CMU is one of the few major research institutions in the world offering programmes at the master’s level in Engineering in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Speaking after the meeting with the President, Dr Papias Musafiri, the minister for education, said the continued partnership between Rwanda and the institution would play a huge role in building a pool of skilledpeople in engineering.

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