The Ministry of Education, in collaboration with different partners, is in the process of establishing in Rwanda an African Centre for School Leadership.

This was announced by the Education Minister, Valentine Uwamariya at the opening of the 13th Policy Dialogue Forum of the International Task Force on Teachers, being hosted in Kigali.

Uwamariya said that the project is still in the pipeline, but discussions on the establishment of the centre are already ongoing, between the Ministry of Education and its partners.

"The aim of this centre is supporting governments in Africa to build capacity in promoting effective school leadership, and improve quality of teaching, and learning outcomes.

"We need to have a centre where we continuously train people who will join the leadership in different schools, and provide tools to the teachers, and train them in ICT skills” she said.

Uwamariya added that this facility will not only serve Rwanda but the whole of the African continent.

New teacher’s curriculum in the offing

Uwamariya added that as a way of addressing the gap of teachers in the country a new Teachers’ Training College (TTC) is being reviewed.

"We realized that the curriculum of TTC was not well designed and recently it has been reviewed, and the first graduate of that new program will come out next year,”

"We believe that the new curriculum will provide or support competent teachers that can answer needs at classroom level” she said.

According to statistics from UNESCO, Sub-Saharan Africa alone requires 15 million more teachers to reach the educational goals by 2030.

Addressing the issue of teachers’ gap in the region, Carlos Vargas Tamez, UNESCO representative, Chief of Section for Teacher Development and Head of Secretariat for the Teacher Task Force, said that it starts with governments investing a big proportion of funds in education.

"There is a global recommendation of Governments to spend at least four to six per cent of the gross national product in education and at least fifteen to twenty per cent going to education expenditures, but we are far from reaching that bench mark” he said.

However, he commended Rwanda’s efforts in creating a welfare for teachers for instance an increase of 10 per cent of their salary every fiscal year, which can be set as an example to provide solutions to the problem.