It has been a great year for education

If you doubt the headline above then maybe you need to just consider the fact that this time last year you were not able to read this. Yes 2013 saw the birth of Education Times, a pullout that aims to shed more light on educational matters. As the sector grows so should the platforms that cover it like this one offered by The New Times. On the whole, 2013 has been a year of cleanup and prioritisation. To start with, several public institutions of higher learning were merged to create the University of Rwanda. The objective was to streamline higher education and develop the university into a research based competitive academic institution. Still with universities, it is in this year that some more universities were accredited by the National Council for Higher Education and these included the University of Kigali, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, and Oklahoma Christian University. As part of the efforts to clean up the system, the Rwanda Education Board no longer allows anyone who does not possess a certificate showing that they sat national examinations at the ordinary secondary level, to register or sit for national examinations at the advanced secondary level. In the same spirit, students who were attending university but lacked the required two principal passes were also expelled on the grounds that they were wrongly admitted, a situation that was prevalent in private universities. There has been a lot of emphasis on skills development with the Workforce Development Authority getting a huge chunk of the education budget for the running of Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) programmes. The President even went as far as creating a Ministerial post (state) for TVET. Going forward, 2014 is clearly looking like a promising year for education in Rwanda.