Mastercard Foundation To Inject $190M In Rwanda For Education

Posted August 10, 2018

Mastercard Foundation has announced plans to start the Leadership In Teaching (LIT) initiative in Rwanda, the first of its kind in Africa.

The center of teaching excellence will provide technology based skills to over 8250 teachers and 250000 students in secondary schools in Rwanda over the next five years.

The center was initially to start in September as earlier announced but Mastercard officials said plans are underway and the physical space is already in existence in Kigali.

“The center will be opened soon and we have started with Rwanda as a pilot country but we are in a rigorous process of identifying other countries in the future,” said James McIntyre, the Program Manager Education and Learning at MasterCard Foundation in Rwanda.

LIT is one of the two new initiatives that the foundation launched in March this year, under the ‘Young Africa Works’ initiative both with a bounty commitment of US$100 million. The other is Hanga Ahazaza- aimed at enhancing tourism and hospitality skills training.

Mastercard foundation has operations in 29 countries in Africa out of the 45 countries where it has funded various financial and education activities amounted to $190 million in the past 11 years. The additional $90 million was raised from partners.

At a Press Round Table meeting today, Alemayehu Konde Koira, the Mastercard Foundation Country Representative said that the choice of coming to Rwanda was informed by the good leadership of President Paul Kagame and an enabling environment which has made their projects a success.

Under the Scholars program, the foundation will provide 35,000 scholarships committed for African students with 1200 of them going to Rwanda’s FAWE girls school students to get high quality education and 125 scholarships to Carnegie Melon University and The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Rwanda.

Under the tourism and hospitality skills training, Rica Rwigamba, the Program Manager Youth Livelihoods at Mastercard said that 30,000 youths in the sector will be trained with 17,000 of them being new entrants and the 13,000 already in the practice.

“We are looking at enabling the sector to have skills which match with the needs of the employers, this comes from the 18 months of research and diagnosis of what the sector needs,” Rwigamba said at the discussion.

The foundation will this August 9-11, 2018 host the Boabab Scholars summit in which 71 entries (30 teams) in the 3rd edition of the Social Venture Challenge winners will get seed funding of $5000 each and mentorship.

Mastercard Foundation has announced plans to start the Leadership In Teaching (LIT) initiative in Rwanda, the first of its kind in Africa.

The center of teaching excellence will provide technology based skills to over 8250 teachers and 250000 students in secondary schools in Rwanda over the next five years.

The center was initially to start in September as earlier announced but Mastercard officials said plans are underway and the physical space is already in existence in Kigali.

LIT is one of the two new initiatives that the foundation launched in March this year, under the ‘Young Africa Works’ initiative with a bounty commitment of US$100 million. The other is Hanga Ahazaza- aimed at enhancing tourism and hospitality skills training.

Mastercard foundation has operations in 29 countries in Africa out of the 45 countries where it has funded various financial and education activities amounted to $2.1 billion and $190 million in Rwanda alone.

Of the total, $90 million has been invested in Rwanda since 2011 by the Foundation through implementing partners.

Under the tourism and hospitality skills training, Rica Rwigamba, the Program Manager at MasterCard said that 30,000 youths in the sector will be trained with 17,000 of them being new entrants and the 13,000 already in the practice.