Dear Editor,

For Rwanda to compete and win globally, it cannot afford to compromise on quality. This applies to education quality every bit as much as it does to the quality of coffee for export or the quality of building construction.  Quality is embraced where high standards are first put in place and then, unwaveringly enforced.

These standards may be home-grown or they may mirror standards in place or in the countries with which Rwanda wishes to compete. Once put in place, there can be no compromise on enforcement of quality standards. Any wavering on this point is fatal.

For instance, those aspiring to join the 2010 intake into the MBA program at the SFB in Kigali were faced with two quality hurdles - in the Test Of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the Graduate Management Achievement Test (GMAT).

The minimum acceptable grade in each screening test was set at the same level as in SFB’s partner institutions for the delivery of its postgraduate programs. These institutions are the Maastricht School of Management in the Netherlands in the case of the GMAT and the University of the Pacific in the United States in the case of the TOEFL.

Quality evolves from benchmarking against the best-- not in Rwanda - but in the world, as SFB has done. SFB will always go for the quality.

Professor Reid E. Whitlock

Rector
SFB