Rwanda being one of East African countries that are not richly endowered with natural resources, it has envisaged its human capital as the only available resources it has and therefore its engine in first tracking the socio-economic development agenda.
This notion is relevant to vision 2020 where human resource development and building of a knowledge based economy are fundamental pillars.
Developing knowledge infrastructure by massive investments in education and training are taken as a benchmark in facilitating the acceleration and possible increases in skills, capacities and competences of Rwandan people has become apriority issue in the recent years.
This is further manifested in the 2011 world bank indicating that, over 4.7% of Rwanda’s GDP is spent on education hence validating the urgency and prioritization of this critical sector.
However, the key underlying issues requiring attention are; how sustainable, relevant and productive is the Rwandan human capital base if at all is available anyway?
While human capital theory has existed since 1960’s by Schultz a senior Economists who argued that, investing in people through education is like any other investment in physical capital which he calls (human capital) and hence having a positive correlation to general economic development of every economy.
Human capital development is seen as a key ingredient for socio-economic transformation.
Rwanda believes that it’s through this human capital development that a sustainable economic growth and development will be realized in the long-run, as a higher stock of skilled human capital will trigger more productivity in the economy hence positively impacting the national income of Rwanda.
However, in analysing and addressing key issues, has Rwanda with all its extra-ordinary efforts to build a knowledge based economy tackled the fundamental challenges of making its human capital base more sustainable and relevant to its development score card?
With the concept of human capital being broad that encompasses, welfare of the population, health and education, my line of argument will only dwell on one factor of education and specifically higher level of education which is usually taken as the fountain of a capable and productive labour force.
While am proud to give a lot of credit to Rwandan government policies in addressing the key parameters of its human capital with health being at fore front where by tangible achievements have been recorded in improving the general welfare of Rwandan community, reducing drastically the rampant diseases like malaria and HIV Aids, family planning programs, addressing infant mortality rates, improving the life expectancy of Rwandese among other evident demographic trends in the health discipline.
The education frontline needs more to be desired and addressed, while the tremendous efforts to upgrade and uplift education sector are very promising in Rwanda today, from universal primary and secondary education systems, government scholarships to higher education, student loan schemes, presidential awards, government patternships with donor funds, private sector led initiatives, technical vocational and education training (TVET) programs mention them, almost all these have addressed the issue of supply side, hence a pragmatic and demand led competency based policies should be put in place to address the demand needs of the labour market.
Strategic frameworks and policies should be put in place to address these challenges, which may include continuous prioritization of government expenditure on education especially on higher education by focusing on those critical areas that are highly relevant to key priority sectors of government.
Taking the recently released national skills survey in the private sector report 2011-2012 by RDB that emphasised on ICT, Mining and Energy, there is no training institutions and universities in Rwanda that offer mining training programs for professionals and technicians like mine engineers, Geologists, Geophysicists and Geochemists when actually mining sector is one of the fastest growing sectors in the country.
This validates the actual skills gap in the demand and supply in relation to education.
Even in the key sectors like ICT where Rwanda is highly applauded, notable skills like software development, digital electronics and mobile software engineering are majorly lacking in the country.
Finally, on the subject of brain drain, while most Rwandans tend to benefit from government funding through scholarships and credit schemes, it would be unfortunate to find out that, majority of them especially those who get rare chances to study abroad for quality education rarely come back to significantly contribute to their country’s socio-economic development.
Some don’t even pay back their return on investment as a result of government’s expenditure of its scarce resources on them, this needs well formulated actions to be put in place so as to ensure the value for money on the beneficiaries by ensuring that, these people (even my self) come back and enormously contribute to our country’s development agenda if our long-term dream of building a vibrant and sustainable Knowledge based economy is to be realized.
The writer is a Rwandan student doing masters in the Netherlands
Contact author ::: Mugabiwamuka@yahoo.co.uk
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