The challenges of promoting engineering education in developing countries: the case of Rwanda

Engineering and technical training has been identified as a key area for investment in order to stimulate industrial and technological development in less developed countries. Most sub-Saharan African countries have now started to invest their scarce resources in technical education. However, these countries face the challenges of meeting global standards of training and continue to depend on expatriate academic staff to run their programmes. Being tailored by expatriate or local staff largely trained in developed nations, the curricula being used may not focus on meeting local needs; this results in an output of graduates who are largely incapable of facing local challenges. In the absence of national or regional accreditation bodies, the quality of this output is questionable. There are genuine efforts to adopt ICT modes of virtual training through the support of the African Virtual University (AVU). In the absence of a strong industrial base on the ground, the full potential of programmes run by the AVU may not be fully realised. In this paper, the authors identify and seek to explain the various challenges being faced by technical institutions in offering engineering and technical education. The central African country of Rwanda is used as a case study.