New vice-chancellor’s focus is on education innovation

The University of Rwanda (UR), the only and largest public higher learning institution in Rwanda, which has six colleges, has committed to improving the quality of education and linking up with both the private and public sector to equip students with skills needed in the market as well as improving student, staff and community welfare.

University World News caught up with Professor Alexandre Lyambabaje, the newly appointed vice-chancellor, to find out more about how he intends to take the institution forward.

UWN: It has been almost two months since you took over as vice-chancellor of the UR. What have been your priorities?

Lyambabaje: When you find an institution ready and running, you may not start by introducing your own priorities because the organisation already has priorities.

For the UR, one of the key priorities is the improvement of quality of education, quality of research, and advancement of innovation in the Rwandan community, the benefit of the outside communities in the region and worldwide.

We target mainly three areas. The first one is related to academic human resources. We are investing in training our academic staff at the highest level for PhD degrees in-country and outside.

We also do our best to recruit the best students because what we get as inputs informs the outputs. We are also aiming to improve the general welfare of students, academic staff, and the entire community.

Improving the quality of research, innovation and teaching is about the availability of the soft- and hardware for teaching and learning while the third aspect is about infrastructure.

UWN: The UR has the ambition to have 90% of students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) courses. Why do you think this is important?

Lyambabaje: STEM ... includes areas such as medicine, engineering, and fundamental sciences. For Rwanda, it is important that we build capacity in those areas so that the development of Rwanda and our strategy for transformation be piloted, and be implemented by knowledgeable people in those areas.

UWN: How is the university trying to balance STEM vs non-STEM courses?

Lyambabaje: Although we are putting strong emphasis and building capacity on science, technology, and mathematics, we don’t forget that we need to put in place multidisciplinary competencies.

We must understand the society we work in. We have to understand the mindset of people or, if need be, change the mindset so that the innovation that will come from sciences and technologies becomes acceptable to human beings that will be consuming and using those technologies.

UWN: There is the issue of conducting research that impacts communities and contributes to the country’s ambition to become a knowledge-based economy. How do you intend to push for that?

Lyambabaje: When it comes to education, I think we are the only one offering PhD degrees in-country, meaning that the capacity for doing research, and the capacity for innovation is mainly being built from here. Almost 80% of topics in research activities emanate from our communities.

The number of people doing research is increasing, thanks to post-graduate programmes, [including] students who are normally supervised by academic staff.

For independent research activities, we must look at the availability of in-country facilitation to undertake research activities.

For a long time in Rwanda, we did not have the kind of institution to fund the research activities but now we have the National Council for Science and Technology (NCST). We have ongoing research projects funded by the council. At the UR, we are also looking at the budgetary allocation to make allowance for research.

In East Africa, we are working with sister universities in a recently established East African Centre for Mathematical Research.

UWN: What is the relationship like between the UR and private universities?

Lyambabaje: In the past, there was a relationship between the Private Universities’ Association and the UR. We plan to continue that working relationship and if you look at most private universities, they also get services from academic staff from the UR and we need to formalise it.

UWN: The number of staff with a PhD stands at 26% at the UR. How is the university trying to increase that number?

Lyambabaje: There are various reasons [for the figure]. It is more about looking at the ratio of PhD holders to the number of students. The indicators of the percentage of PhD holders as compared to the total of academic staff may not be the only indicators but we have also to think about the ratio number of academic staff who are qualified to teach in the department.

You know, training PhD students, is quite costly. It is at least a four-year training period and, when they graduate, [universities] must compete with international organisations and government agencies and other institutions [to employ them].

The retention is still a little bit of a challenge for the UR, given the competition, but we are trying to train many and to retain a good number of them.

UWN: As a sportsman [who played and coached volleyball at a national level], how are you going to improve sports activities at the university?

Lyambabaje: Sometimes when you look at sport, people are more sensitive to competition, but sport for life is so important. For students and young people, they practise sport because it is needed to grow well. Sport is important as it is a good way of reducing stress and pressure. We have staff on every campus responsible for sport and leisure as the entry point.

We are engaging with federations for sports. We are also creating a centre of excellence at the UR for sports education.

UWN: Why do you think the UR has not been featured among the top universities based on, for example, the Ranking Web of Universities?

Lyambabaje: The ranking of a university involves understanding the metrics that are used to rank the universities. The ranking could be guided by those metrics, trying to align the activities and programmes according to the metrics.

The second one is to look at the priority of the country and region and respond to the needs of the region. We will keep progressing by improving the quality of our programmes, the quality of our staff, research and innovation, the quality of our candidates who graduate from the UR, and addressing the number of concerns. There are other indicators that are based on the size of the university, and other criteria.

We are also looking for a partnership with other research institutions within the country, so that we can improve research outputs, publications and journals and take advantage of the existence of African journals.

UWN: There was a plan for harmonisation of the EAC [East African Community] curricula. As the outgoing executive secretary of the Inter-University Council of East Africa, how has the journey been?

Lyambabaje: Sometimes people think that working towards harmonisation of the curriculum means making them identical. Not at all.

The Inter-University Council of East Africa has been working on that harmonisation by providing what we call benchmark and key programmes and [has been doing so] for the past 10 years. Quite a lot has been done to provide benchmarks for quite a number of programmes, most recently for sports education.

Quite good work has been done. It facilitates the mobility of students across the region, the mutual recognition of degrees and the mobility of professionals and their recognition.

UWN: There has been concern about universities producing unskilled graduates. How is the RU working to improve the quality of education?

Lyambabaje: We are talking about skills, competencies, and attitude at work. I do not believe that there is an issue with knowledge, but one of the challenges is communication skills.

You could see that students who complete secondary schools sometimes are not comfortable in the use of any of the three languages, meaning Kinyarwanda, English, or French. So, when they come to the university with that challenge it becomes difficult to remedy that in a university setting.

We have established a centre for language enhancement which we want to see playing a bigger role to improve communication skills.

The second challenge is the attitude at work and the way people really commit to doing whatever is given to them well. That is something that can be worked on.

And the third one is the management of equipment, like telephones.

I have seen in some classes that, when a student’s telephone rings, the student goes out to respond in the middle of a lecture, and lecturers at the time failed to enforce [rules to prevent] that.

So, at the UR, we have to come up with really clear rules and regulations that will inform students’ attitudes and the use of technologies in classes.

Lastly, it is about practice. With the increase in the number of students, laboratories have not been able to provide the necessary basic skills to students in STEM or in ICT.

The use of the software is not good enough, because the computer labs are not many. So, what we are doing now is to see how we can start building a smart or virtual lab to complement the physical labs and invest more in addressing the issues.

UWN: How is the university working with industry to ensure it produces graduates needed in the market?

Lyambabaje: We want to build a partnership with the private and public sector to develop the curriculum and to review the curriculum so that we can identify existing gaps.

The second [plan] is to work with them towards internships. The last is industrial attachment (workplace learning) after graduation to see whether that formula can also start working so that, once you graduate, you have an attachment and you learn from the companies through practice.

UWN: What has been the impact of COVID-19 on the UR?

Lyambabaje: The university was obliged to close its doors for a period of time. No one anticipated the pandemic. E-learning was not well developed, so trainers and students had to get used to the use of ICT and e-learning platforms.

Because the businesses were closed, self-sponsored students faced challenges to pay tuition fees, so there has been a socio-economic impact, too.