Rwanda needs a total of 18,005 professional teachers to be able to improve the student ratio as well as cater for the new classrooms being constructed to decongest existing ones.

This was announced by Valentine Uwamaliya, the Minister of Education during a press conference on Monday, November 16.

The announcement came on the same day a total of 6,405 teachers were recruited in what the minister an initial phase in the process to bridge the shortage.

"The ones we have recruited today are for the initial phase, but this is an ongoing process,” Uwamaliya said.

Of the vacant positions, she added, 14, 307 teachers are needed for primary schools, while a total of 3,698 teachers are needed in secondary schools across the country.

The announcement also comes just a fortnight after officials at Rwanda Education Board (REB) were suspended for mishandling the recruitment exercise for teachers.

Reported challenges included failure to deploy teachers who had, since last year, passed their entry exams, tabulation of data among others.

"Some of the other challenges in the previous process include the issue of teachers who were transferred far from their homes, and also teachers who had been on the waiting lists longer than those who were recruited,” Uwamaliya added.

The Minister of Education, Valentine Uwamariya (C)Minister of State in charge of Primary and Secondary, Gaspard  Twagirayesu and Minister Claudette Irere address media  on November 16 (Craish Bahizi)

She, however, said that with the new teacher placement system, the previous mistakes were rectified.

"It is true the previous placement was not done well. There was no systematic grading for the teachers. There were cases of teachers with lower marks of the entry exams being recruited as opposed to their counterparts with higher marks, some teachers were taken far from their homes but we have corrected that in this new version,” she reiterated.

While placing teachers, the minister explained that; "We first recruited the teachers based on where they sat their entry exams from, if the number of the vacancies is exceeded then they were taken to nearby districts.”

"This is the initial phase. By next week, we plan to recruit more teachers. So far we have 608 new classrooms where these teachers will be placed.”

According to the minister, more teachers are needed as the country gears towards full resumption of physical classrooms.

"Next week the second cohort of boarding students will return to school. All these are areas where we believe that these students are needed.” She said.

Big percentage of city students have not reported back to school

Speaking about the general return percentage of students both in primary and secondary school, the minister said that students based in Kigali consist of the largest percentage of students who have not returned to school.

For instance, she said, available statistics indicate that only 85 per cent of students in Kigali have returned to school, against their 94.5% in the southern province, 89.3% in the Northern Province, 89.2% in the eastern province and 84.2% in the western province.

This shows that 15 per cent of students based in Kigali had not reported back to school.

Similarly, for secondary schools, 15.6 per cent had not yet returned to school.

The minister vowed to look into the matter and also encouraged parents to let their students go back to school.

Meanwhile, Uwamaliya allayed fears that teachers who have not reported back for their duties will be replaced.