OLE Rwanda
Background
The Government of Rwanda has established the goals of achieving universal primary education by 2010 and education for all by 2015. These goals reflect the UN Millennium Development Goal and Dakar agreements that look to every one of the world’s children having access to basic education by 2015. It is assumed that this education will be both free of charge and of high quality. The Ministry of Education is committed meeting these goals.
Success depends largely on having a well trained teaching force and access to high quality resources. Developing teacher competencies and professionalism is central to the improvement of pupil achievement in Rwanda, as is developing new, improved curricula and resources. The Ministry of Education recognises the power of information communication technologies (ICT) to facilitate and support this work.
The Rwandan government and cooperating social benefit agencies have launched high quality initiatives using information communication technologies to support education. It will take close coordination of these efforts to establish lasting changes that support coherent use of ICT in classroom teaching. Cooperation across initiatives will include sharing information; making good use of high quality, free, and openly shared educational resources; and innovative use of low-cost information technologies. OLE Rwanda will play a leading part in making this cooperation possible and vibrant.
Rwanda and other countries of the Great Lakes Region like Burundi, and Democratic Republic of Congo also present extraordinary challenges. These areas are known for their protracted conflicts that have caused more than five million deaths in the past four decades.
The dream of young people in Rwanda is to live together in harmony in a region free of devastating conflicts. Their wish is to transform existing differences and conflict into futures that will serve as the foundation for peace and development of their communities, countries and the region as a whole. There is a requirement to institute peace building activities in all communities, organisations, and institutions.
OLE Rwanda is positioned to demonstrate that quality universal basic education is possible and affordable, to lead the way in establishing curricula supporting peace building and conflict resolution, and to initiate peace building and conflict resolution activities.
OLE Rwanda was officially launched in the summer or 2008 and aims to help all of its children gain literacy in the coming years.
Teaching Teachers English
The Government of Rwanda has mandated English as the official language for schools beginning with the earliest grades. They seem to feel that command of English is one of the requirements for Rwanda to become a major economic force not only for Africa but for the world as a whole.
One problem with this decision is that the majority of their teachers do not speak English. The Ministry of Education has, therefore, established the Rwanda English Action Program (REAP) charged with enabling some 40,000 or more elementary school teachers to become fluent in English and the teaching of English as a Second Language quickly.
Jacques Murinda, Executive Director of OLE Rwanda is working with the Ministry to adapt the TeacherMate learning system for use by teachers for learning English. Working in cooperation with Innovations for Learning OLE Rwanda and the Ministry is developing a proposal for a two-phase REAP program. The first phase will pilot the use of the TeacherMate device and software as an ESL learning system and the second will scale this effort to all elementary school students in Rwanda.
National Education Library
OLE Rwanda is working the the Ministry of Education to adapt for Rwanda the digital k-12 courseware developed by the Shuttleworth Foundation in South Africa. The English language content would become a part of a proposed Rwanda National Education Library that would contain free and open courseware for use by teachers and students throughout the country. Support is being sought for this project.
Leadership
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Mr. Jacques M. Murinda, Executive Director
Mr Murinda holds a Masters Degree in Library and Information Science of Makerere University Uganda. He has been a teacher and he worked as the Deputy Chairperson of the Southern Africa Youth Movement in South Africa, an organization that had members in the 14 countries of the Southern Africa Development community. He was involved in capacity building projects for young people and civil society organizations and he was a mentor in youth leadership training that aimed at empowering young people to participate in the development of their communities and countries.
Board of Directors
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Bizimana Muhabera (Chairman)
He is the Director of Library at the Kigali Institute of Education (KIE) and is currently chairing the members of the board of Open Learning Exchange Rwanda (OLE Rwanda). He holds a Masters’ degree in Library and Information Science and he has been working with the Ministry of Education as a personal Assistant to the Minister of Education before joining KIE. He was also the Administrative and Financial Secretary at the national bureau of protestant schools in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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Mr Serge Guillaume Nzabonimana
Mr Nzobonimana is an adviser to the Minister of Youth. He worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and cooperation, at the Ministry of commerce industry, investment promotion, tourism and cooperative. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in communication and Law. He worked as a journalist at Radio Rwanda.
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Mr Narcisse
He is a OLE Rwanda board member. He is also currently the Inspector General in Rwanda
Partners
- This information will be available soon
About Rwanda
Rwanda is a small country in the center of Africa, bordered by Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is very densely populated, with more than 10 million citizens.
Rwanda is a very fertile, and most people who do not live in cities work on small farms.
How you can help
All OLE Centres currently require a breadth of public and private sector partnerships. Participation among individuals and industries, government, and independent NGOs are all vital to the creation and sustainability of local OLE Centers, as well as the growth and success of their particular models for ensuring universal basic education by 2015.
The individuality of local circumstances, and the methods for addressing local learning systems also means that every OLE Centre offers unique investment possibilities.
How you can help with OLE Rwanda:
- Teacher development/education materials, expertise, and on-the-ground teacher-training volunteers
- Hardware and digitization expertise to assist bringing existing local content online
- Financial contributions
- OLE Consortium members are thankful for help with translation of learning resources from English into Nepali, Spanish, Mandarin, French and Arabic. If you can help translate, or contribute to the cost of translation, we will be very grateful.
