Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is seen as a main engine to support employment promotion for youth especially through development of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs). The overall objective of Rwanda’s TVET policy is to provide the economy with qualified and competitive workers. The Rwanda Polytechnic (RP) has been established to oversee the implementation of the TVET Policy, and the NST targets to produce 214,000 decent and productive jobs per year taking into consideration the NST strategy for the promotion of industrialization and a structural shift in Rwanda’s export base to high-value goods and services.
Examples of some innovations in the TVET Sector include: The Rwanda Coding Academy, which is a model school that aims to produce a pool of top end experts in the field of software engineering in order to address the current shortage of software developers on Rwandan market and the region. The school comes to respond to the recommendations of the Rwanda Digital Talent Policy as approved by the cabinet in April 2018. The Rwanda coding academy’s vision is to produce quality and excellence in software engineering workforce development. Its mission is to train young talented and gifted Rwandans in software programming, promote quality and excellence in software engineering skills and to position Rwanda as a software development hub. The school is hosted at Nyabihu Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) School. The facility worth over Rwf4 billions is located in Nyabihu District and was completed early 2019. The school has already two intakes with 60 students each.
Another example of an innovation in the TVET sector is the African Digital Media Academy (ADMA) which provides students with the skills necessary to work in all areas of the digital media industry with the same degree of talent and resources as anywhere else in the world. The Government of Rwanda established the ADMA through the Workforce Development Authority (WDA) in partnership with Pixel Corps, a world class multimedia company based the U.S.
A Skills Development Fund (SDF) has been established to support in short term training of youth including employer-led short-term vocational training and apprenticeships, provision of labor market relevant skills for out-of-school youth, and rapid-response training to address skills gaps experienced by enterprises. During 2018 a total of 4,567 youth were trained under the SDF and a further 9,550 in 2019.
In a bid to strengthen the quality of teaching in TVET 40% of TVET trainers were trained and certified in pedagogical skills in 2018/2019 by the Rwanda TVET Training Institute (RTTI).
