Heads of two vastly different school systems have met in New York City this week to share ideas on the major restructuring challenge they both face. Rwanda's minister of Education, Science, Technology and Scientific Research, Romain Murenzi, along with Professor Silas Lwakabamba, President of the Kigali Institute of Sciences, Technology and Management, sat down with Joel I. Klein, chancellor of the city's Department of Education.
New York City has 1.1 million children attending kindergarten through twelfth grade in 1,400 schools. In Rwanda there are 1.9 million children in primary school (grades 1-6), 250,000 secondary students (grades 6-12), and 25, 000 students enrolled in higher education programs. Klein has put in place a comprehensive reform program called Children First, designed to transform a troubled school system to ensure that every child would graduate with the skills to become a fully engaged member of society. Murenzi's challenge was to restructure and rebuild a school system that was destroyed during the genocide in Rwanda between 1994-1995.
The Rwandans are in the United States at the invitation of the Africa-America Institute to participate in the "Africa and America - Connecting Worlds" program. The two men will travel to Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska; Des Moines and Ames, Iowa; Silicon Valley, California; Phoenix, Arizona and South Orange, New Jersey. Funded by a grant from the United Nations Millennium Campaign, the Connecting Worlds program includes a multi-city series of lectures and town meetings to educate Americans about the United Nations Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty worldwide and to illustrate their relevance to Africa and to the United States.
Murenzi said the challenges facing Rwanda are formidable, and he outlined three priorities. The first is to build parent and teacher boards for local schools. By engaging parents, educators hope that children will be encouraged to stay in school and complete their education. The second priority is to centralize Rwanda's 13 school districts by April 2006, to facilitate all the schools in in the country to work towards a common goal. Eliminating child labor is the third priority. In Rwanda, often at the encouragement of parents, children drop out of school to work in tea plantations, providing the immediate advantage of income for the family.
"What advice might you have?" Murenzi asked Klein.
"Our goal in New York was to simplify the organizational structure," Klein responded. "We created a parent co-coordinator position in each school, and this individual is the person who coordinates our community outreach. It has been very effective in solving local community problems and establishing a dialogue with the educational leadership in New York."
When the conversation turned to technology, there was more to discuss than might have been supposed. Lwakabamba described his task of bringing technology and distance learning to Rwanda, and he said that a related aim is developing alternative energy sources to underpin the effort. There is sufficient water for power generation in Rwanda, he said, but the difficulty is in accessing it. Through building infrastructure and educating people to become engineers, Rwanda hopes to become both a source and an example for the region. Once an energy source and connectivity has been established, the goal is to bring computers into every school so all children in Rwanda will be linked to the world.
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What would be helpful?" queried Klein?
The Rwandans said they hope connections can be made that will lead to U.S./Rwandan collaborations, including teacher and faculty exchanges, opportunities for distance learning and networking that will identify more resources, both in-kind and financial.
Mora McLean, the CEO and President of AAI, said such encounters raise public awareness about and spur discussion of in the Millennium Development Goals across the United States and highlight the role Americans can play in assisting Africans to achieve them. We want Americans to understand how the values underlying the MDGs converge with U.S. values and interest," she said.
