High School Idol: The nursery bed for Rwanda’s next young stars

Danny Izere is an ambitious teenager and founder of High School Idol, an annual event that recognises and gives a platform to young Rwandans with extra ordinary talents. As a child, Izere always dreamed of being a pilot but that has now changed. His vision is to start a charity organisation to offer hope to homeless children and help young entrepreneurs to achieve their dreams.Born in 1995 to Dominic Bwanakweli and Prudence Mushonganana, Izere is a twin and the second born in a family of three. He is a senior five student at SOS Technical High School.He is in the final preparations for this year’s High School Idol. The New Times’ Sarah Kwihangana talked to the 18-year-old about his project and future plans. Excerpts;How did you start High school Idol?In 2012, Peace and Love Proclaimers, a school club at SOS Technical High School, asked us to create an event which can bring together students and teach them about contributing to Agaciro Development Fund. I decided that we should encourage young people by awarding them through a competition dubbed High school Awards. But we were unable to pay for their performances. We tried to seek help from the school administration but in vain. But I never gave up. Three days to the event for the High School awards, I twitted President Paul Kagame, inviting him to attend our event. He responded to my tweet and called our headmaster to ask him about our event and later got involved in the preparations. Our first event was called High School Awards and it was a big deal because it was attended by different government officials and heads of schools. We managed to raise over Rwf1 million and contributed to the Agaciro Development Fund.This encouraged us in away to keep organising such events because initially we had only 10,000 francs, but we were able to raise one million francs for Agaciro. We later changed the name of the event to High school Idol.What is the idea behind High school Idol?One day, my friends and I were watching Primus Guma Guma Superstar, an annual Rwanda reality singing competition sponsored by Bralirwa, and we wondered why the event was only for renowned musicians, yet we thought it should instead favour upcoming musicians. That is how we came up with the idea to create a music competition that would help talented upcoming singers to be recognised. However, High School Idol is not only for awarding talented youth but we also use it as a platform to address issues affecting our community through entertainment. For example, this year’s High School Idol was about fighting drug abuse among the youth and promotion of Information Communication Technology (ICT).What does it require for one to join the competition?We have a committee of 15 members from different schools that carry out nominations. Ideally, we are supposed to go from school to school searching for talented youth but we did not have enough time because third term was too short. We have a website where all the activities are posted and also the voting process is done online by fellow students, which helps us determine the winners.For one to join the High School Idol, you must be a student from any of the schools in Kigali.The competition only applies to students in Kigali because we do not have enough resources to make it a national event. How many students are you currently working with, and how have embraced this?We are working with over 100 students with some in groups from 15 schools. The students are so fascinated about the High School Idol, although there are some challenges like some students prefer money to awards. But we intend to address the issue when we get sponsors.Organising such events has never been a smooth path; what are some of the challenges you face?Finding a good place for everyone to come and attend is not easy. Another challenge is the lack of sponsorship. People don’t take events organised by the youth seriously, yet we want to contribute to the development of our society. Sometimes when we go to some offices, the secretaries do not allow us to see the managers. What are your future plans?My plan is to register our event with Rwanda Development Bank (RDB), look for sponsorship and roll it out throughout the country. We also want to plan for the event early enough with schools staging talent competitions and we pick the finalists from different categories to be awarded.

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High School Idol: The nursery bed for Rwanda’s next young stars