Valentine Uwamariya, Minister of Education, urged private schools including higher educational institutions to leverage the national recovery fund to keep teachers on the payroll in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis.
She said this while speaking on the situation where teachers mainly in private schools complain of having been laid off by their employers till September after the government closed schools.
The government is to deploy a special economic recovery fund estimated at more than $200 million ( roughly Rwf186bn) to support local businesses that are hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
Private schools are amongst the hardest hit companies.
Minister Uwamariya said Higher Learning Institutions are facing challenges during lockdown but they can look for ways to cope.
“Many schools started firing their staff due to financial constraints because they would not be able to pay staff salaries up to September 2020. However, this is not the right approach; they should instead apply for the appropriate relief package as businesses from the government’s economic recovery plan to cater for the welfare of their staff,” she said.
She urged higher education institutions to diversify funding sources to support operations once schools reopened in September 2020.
She noted, though, that there are conditions for resuming operations in September, saying institutions must be assessed on financial viability before they can reopen.
“Any Higher Learning Institution without clear financial sustainability will not be allowed to resume operations until it proves to be financially sustainable to offer quality education,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Minister stated that universities that had taken online learning support as an alternative to ordinary teaching and learning model have been warned.
“Online support is not alternative to normal teaching. Some institutions wanted to take as normal mode of teaching and charge tuition. They will continue to provide online support to students up to September without charging any fees waiting for normal teaching and learning mode to resume,” she explained.
She explained that students do not have equal access to the online system and therefore can’t replace normal teaching online support.
This, she said, is due to the lack of ICT tools and adequate internet connectivity in most institutions, while others are not aware of using e-learning platforms due to lack of training.
She said that accreditation should be pursued for every institution to run a fully-fledged model of online distance learning as an alternative to conventional teaching and learning.
She noted that only a few universities that already operate online models such as Oklahoma Christian University in Rwanda, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Kepler have this accreditation.
“Even University of Rwanda has not yet got such accreditation and therefore it is not allowed to take online support as an alternative to normal teaching. Such accreditation means that a university teaches, examines and provide degrees without using the physical model of teaching,” she said.