Rwanda’s first professional leadership coaching academy - Kora Coaching & Business Academy (KCA) looks to start spreading its services in different African countries. Leadership coaching is a process of giving mentorship services to leaders of various organisations, businesses and other institutions, to aid them to champion transformation and impact both in their companies and also on an individual basis. According to Mireille Ineza Karera, the CEO of the academy, such services were rare in the country and many Rwandan organizations have in many cases depended on international coaching & training companies to meet their needs. Mireille Ineza Karera, CEO of the academy, addresses the event yesterday. / Sam Ngendahimana The institution was launched in March 2018 and it has since churned out 18 certified professional coaches, six of whom graduated yesterday. Speaking in an interview with Sunday Times, Karera said that in November, her institution will launch an online leadership coaches certification academy and they already have students from Malawi, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and other countries. The coaching industry is less developed in Africa, unlike in some developed countries, for example in the USA where the industry has over 88,000 coaching businesses. Main African countries with an active coaching industry are Kenya & South Africa, which are also the main service providers to Rwandan organizations. The academy aims at training local coaches who will be able to cater for domestic consumption and later export expertise to the world, empowering professionals on the African continent to become certified professional coaches and serve their respective economies in life coaching, leadership coaching and executive coaching, sales and business coaching, and mentoring skills. Claire Akamanzi, the Chief Executive Officer of the Rwanda Development Board who was the guest of honour at the graduation, commended the academy’s efforts of going beyond Rwanda’s borders. She said it supports the country’s plans of becoming a hub, “When we talk about being a hub; extending services from here to the rest of Africa is what we want to achieve. We want to see Rwandans become capable of providing services beyond our borders. We want to see more and more of our people coming up with solutions that the market finds useful and attractive enough,” she said. Mami Said, the Head of Human Resources at Bank of Kigali was one of the graduates of the day. She said that the course has helped her among other things to make an impact at her workplace in being able to look to recognise the talent among the employees that she supervises. Some of the graduates. / Sam Ngendahimana editor@newtimesrwanda.com
