| Ten years after the 1994 genocide in which an estimated 10 percent of the country’s population perished, Rwanda’s devastated education system is now back on its feet. Classrooms have been repaired and new ones built; teachers who fled the mayhem have been reintegrated into the teaching force; arrears in teacher pay have been cleared up; a Genocide Fund has been created specifically to assist orphans; the higher education system has been diversified; and new arrangements for student finance at the tertiary level have been introduced. These successes notwithstanding, the task of transforming the rapid recovery into sustained progress has only just begun. A priority will be to ensure that all Rwandan children are able to complete a full course of primary schooling of reasonable quality and that expansion at postprimary levels proceeds at a pace commensurate with the labor market’s capacity to absorb highly educated job seekers. Achieving these goals will require a rebalancing of public spending in favor of primary education—a shift that will call for continued heavy reliance on private financing at postprimary levels and reforms to reduce unit costs and student bursaries in public higher education. In addition, efforts must be made to direct public subsidies to the most vulnerable children, such as double orphans, so that they can afford to attend school. Policies to improve services delivery will also be critical to ensure that teacher deployment is consistent across schools according to the size of enrollments, that pedagogical materials are available in classrooms, and that instructional hours are increased, particularly in the first three grades, in combination with possible reforms in teacher recruitment practices. Progress will depend, too, on better supervision and incentives designed to encourage more effective classroom practices and so improve student flow and student learning throughout the system. |
