A new $7 million (about Rwf5.9bn) project financed by the Republic of Korea is set to help equip 43000 primary and secondary school teachers with ICT skills in all the districts of the country.

The project dubbed "Capacity Building for ICT in Education” (CADIE) was announced yesterday in an event where the ambassador of the Republic of Korea to Rwanda Kim Eung-joong and the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning Claver Gatete signed the grant financing agreement.

The project will run from 2017 to 2020 implemented by the Rwanda Education Board. It will focus on capacity building of 43000 primary and secondary school teachers as well as 446 district and sector education officers regarding using ICT in education.

This training will be conducted within 60 centres of excellence for ICT in education located in all districts across the country which will also be supported by this project.

"As we try to embark on new vision 2050 and vision 2035, there is no way we can achieve whatever we have set for ourselves without education. Education and training is going to be very critical and we need ICT as an enabler in this,” said Minister Gatete at the signing event.

Ambassador Kim Eung-joong also noted the role of education in national development, citing the case of Korea which was among the poorest countries in 1961 but as of 2016 was the world’s seventh largest exporting country.

According to Ambassador Kim, Korea focused on training teachers and has been able to achieve such high economic growth in a short period of time.

"Korea is not plentiful in natural resources but had only human capital like Rwanda. Education proved to be the most powerful tool. Korea has placed the greatest priority on the development of high quality labour to meet the need of the market,” he said.

Isaac Munyakazi, the Minister for Primary and Secondary Education said that the project supports the country’s vision of a knowledge based economy,

"The vision of our country is a knowledge based economy. Which means we have to build education starting especially from the basic foundation,” he said.

He added that ICT is one of the components that help complement the different things the government is doing.

"We started the programme of ICT in education but it requires equipment, infrastructure and we are grateful for this programme because it has come to help us build the capacity of the teachers educating our children. We cannot think about giving ICT to children when we have not thought about those teaching them,” he said.