The Senate has noted that family conflicts top the list of factors causing children to drop out of school in Rwanda and are urging the government to devise strategies to ensure that children’s education is not disrupted by such undesirable situations.

Senators highlighted this on Monday, February 06, as they adopted the standing Committee on Social Affairs and Human Rights’ report on government’s actions to prevent school dropout in 12-year basic education.

From November 28 to December 7, 2022, the committee members conducted an oversight activity to evaluate the education sector. According to the resultant Committee report, factors for school dropout include family conflicts, poor mindset of some parents on the importance of education, poverty which makes some families unable to afford scholastic materials for their children, and teenage pregnancies.

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Sen Adrie Umuhire, the Chairperson of the Committee, said that they found that domestic conflicts are the number one cause for school dropout among children.

The Committee expressed concern that there are instances where family conflicts reached a level of children losing trust in their parents.

"The Committee found that because of conflicts, there are parents who evaded responsibilities to take care of their children, and children who lost trust in their parents,” she said.

Umuhire said that there are cases where some children drop out of school because their parents have ordered them to look for money instead of attending school.

She said: "The Committee observed that there are parents who do not encourage their children to go to school because there are young people who graduated from school but are unemployed. There are parents claiming that education is useless.”

Sen Juvenal Nkusi said that Rwanda has done so much in terms of ensuring that all children access education, but indicated that there is a need for holistic efforts to deal with school dropout cases.

"There is a need to deal with the root causes so that conflicts in families are reduced, the parents’ mentality improved, and poverty among families drops,” he said.

Available figures from the 2020-2021 statistical year book, published in February 2022 by the Ministry of Education, show that school dropout rates increased at the primary school level from 7.8 per cent, in 2019, to 9.5 per cent, in 2020/21.

For secondary school, school dropout rose from 8.2 per cent in 2019 to 10.3 per cent in 2020/21.

Senator Umuhire said that in primary education, school dropout was higher among male children – with 11.3 per cent, compared to 7.7 per cent among their female counterparts.

However, the situation was reversed at secondary school level, as the dropout rate among female children was 11.1 per cent, higher than that among their male counterparts.

Overall, Umuhire indicated that there are children who turn eight years old before they start attending school. As a result, when they complete senior three, they have a tendency to leave school to find jobs.

According to the law determining the organisation of education, a child starts primary school at the age of at least six years.

Elaborating on why the school dropout level was higher among girls in secondary education, she said that teenage pregnancies were one of the culprits.

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"Some girls feel frustrated by going to school while pregnant,” Umuhire said, adding that it becomes harder for them to return to school after giving birth.