RCA to make contribution for Rwanda’s transformation into pivot of ICT Sector in East Africa
Rwanda Coding Academy (RCA) was established in 2019, as a response to the recommendations of the “Rwanda Digital Talent Policy” as approved by the government of Rwanda in April 2018. The school aims to future talented young professionals in Rwanda with practical and advanced skills in ICT sector, specifically in the fields of programming, embedded system, and cyber security.
Attracting the students with its slogan “Born to Code”, the education modality of RCA is somewhat distinctive from any other schools within Rwanda, which can be noticed from the characteristics of school’s curriculum seemingly flexible and transformative based on the trend of the industry concerned. RCA’s peculiar difficulty does not only apply to its curriculum, but also to the student selection and orientation.
Total 120 new pupils who have received the highest raw marks in Ordinary Level National Examination – particularly the ones who have excellent in mathematics, physics, and English – are given opportunities to study in RCA oriented by National Examination and School Inspection Authority (NESA)in 2022. With such a high expectation on the school, RCA already produced a number of talented young individuals, who had shown a capacity of developing remarkable projects such as KOBRA, an application for visual programming designed to provide easier method for learning and experimenting with machine learning.
In September 2021, Government of Rwanda has signed a Record of Discussion for initiation of RCA Capacity Development Project for enhancement of overall educational and operational capacity of RCA as the school providing specializing education in ICT Sector, under the partnership with Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA). The commencement of the project has come into reality in December 2021, and the project shall be the keystone for establishment of sustainable policies and schemes for providing RCA a basis as the school corresponding the industrial demands as well as the opportunity for implementation of innovative ideas targeting the capacity enhancement to come into practice, which shall be continued until the end of 2025.
Certain outstanding achievements have been accomplished through collaboration of relenant Rwandan government institutions, the school, and the Korean experts providing technical consultations for development of national level and school level policies and guidelines.
Today’s event aims to share the progress of RCA Capacity Development Project with key stakeholders of Rwanda and Korea, with Rwanda Development Board (RDB) and several institutions from ICT Sector such as ICT Chamber, BK TecHouse, Irembo, and RSwitch also invited. To strengthen the collaboration between RCA and institutions from ICT and other sectors, the signing ceremony of memorandums of understanding (MOU) is held.
Further achievements such as procurement of equipment and materials, construction of RCA new campus, initiation of promotional events for exbition of RCA students’ capabilities in ICT field (shall be under the name ‘Hackthon’), capacity enhancement of RCA students and academic staff through invitational training to Korea and also provision of on-site training programmes are expected to be executed accordingly to see the accomplishment of Rwanda Coding Academy as fully-equipped and solid ‘meister school’.
The project is expected to make the contribution for Rwanda’s transformation into hub of ICT Sector in East Africa.
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