The long-awaited Multimedia academy will finally open its doors in Kigali next week. Over 300 students applied, however, only 20 were picked for the first intake.The academy, supported by the Pixel Corps, an American multimedia training and production company, is part of a broad national strategy to empower Rwandans with practical skills and entrepreneurial capacity.In a few months, Rwanda will launch the second phase of the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS), which seeks to usher Rwanda into the club of middle-income nations by the year 2020.The more investments in human capital – the country’s main resource – the closer Rwanda gets to achieving both its medium and long-term aspirations.A national skills audit carried out four years ago showed that the country needed to scale up investments in capacity building programmes, particularly in fields that match with the needs of the labour market.It is training institutions such as the upcoming multimedia academy that will strategically position Rwanda in the growing regional and global competitive market and enable Rwandans to tap into the opportunities that come with integration processes.There’s no doubt the academy, the first of its kind in the country, will go a long way to develop a critical mass of Rwandans with skills in multiple but integrated forms of media (text, graphics and sound), one of the fields where the country has a gap.Nonetheless, such training centers need to be facilitated to accommodate a larger number of students.
