Teachers at Groupe Scolaire Kagugu Catholique grapple with the big number of students due to high student-to-class ratio making it hard for them to dispense courses as they should.
According to Jean Baptiste Jean Baptiste Habanabashaka, the head teacher, the school is one of the most densely populated schools countrywide, with over 6,850 students making the classrooms overcrowded.
"The average is 80 students per class and this makes it hard for teachers to offer the quality education we want to impart because they can’t reach every student when they are teaching,” Habanabashaka said.
However, Habanabashaka hopes that this will be addressed in the near future as the school is set to get twelve classrooms constructed by Rwanda Defense Force (RDF) as part of its Citizen Out Programme that is ongoing countrywide.
The programme is annually organised and lasts weeks in the run up to Liberation Day that is celebrated on July 4.
RDF plans to complete over 120 classrooms in various parts of the country by the end of July and beneficiaries are schools with overcrowding challenges, according to officials.
Some of the schools were completed and will be inaugurated today as the country celebrates July 4 as a liberation day.
"We are getting new twelve modern classrooms and it will help us reduce overcrowding, we hope that we be able to teach well and promote quality education.
Though are enough to address decisively the overcrowding problem, it is a good start for us. We shall mobilise more funds to make sure all students learn from a comfortable environment,” he said.
Habanabakize hailed RDF for the support stressing that it could take time to raise funds to build all needed classroom.
"We are getting these modern classrooms for free. We are thankful for the classrooms and this shows RDF wants to liberate people from illiteracy after liberating us from bad leadership, it shows that the liberation struggle continues but not with guns,” he said.
Virginie Uwimana, a mother of three from Kagugu sector welcomed the new classrooms saying that parents they worried that their kids were not getting quality education due to overcrowding.
"We are happy that the classrooms are being built and this will reduce the number of students in one classroom, we knew our children were overcrowded in classrooms but we had nothing to do. We are thankful that RDF chipped in,” she said.
Initiated in 2009 as Army Week, the RDF Community Outreach Programme (COP) has made tangible achievements in improving the wellbeing of Rwandans and contributing towards human security.
Through this programme, the government has also been able to save money that was used to fund several development projects.
In 2017, The RDF COP activities saved the government Rwf71billion, according to officials.
This year, RDF targets to construct 1,961 houses for the disadvantaged, while 121 classrooms and school latrines will be built, as well as 4,511ha of land cultivated.
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