By Matthew Matola | Development Associate
As a holistic learning community designed to heal and educate Rwanda’s most vulnerable youth, one of our top priorities at The Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village is to prepare our students for life after graduation. Through Formal Education and Life Enrichment Applied Programs, we strive to ensure that our kids are ready for higher education and sustainable employment. Because of a renewed emphasis on entrepreneurship, computer literacy, and English comprehension, we believe that our future graduates should be better equipped than ever before to lead fulfilling adult lives. We are excited to give you a glimpse into how these programs have already begun to change lives in the first term of 2017.
Rwanda is counting on young entrepreneurs to carry its rapid development forward, and thanks to your generosity our students are eager to contribute. With two years dedicated to studying personal finance, goal setting, and agribusiness, and one year dedicated to generating a realistic business plan, we are confident that our graduates will have a meaningful part to play in Rwanda’s burgeoning economy. In Term 1 of 2017, our S6 students even had the opportunity to go on an Entrepreneurship Field Trip with TechnoServe. Visiting five sites across Kayonza District, our kids enjoyed hands-on learning experiences with local entrepreneurs and met low-tech, low-cost innovators in accessible fields like agriculture and construction to gain a better appreciation for how they could create jobs to support themselves.
Rwandan employers have also identified a skill-gap in their country, and our computer literacy program is preparing our kids to help close this gap. With 90 new laptops and a robust curriculum already in action, our students are rapidly gaining experience in key programs like Microsoft Word. Many of our kids had never even touched a computer before coming to the Village, which makes their growing talent for typing and editing documents, including CV’s and cover letters, all the more impressive. Combined with an introduction to the basics of hardware and software in Term 1 of 2017, we believe that this level of computer literacy is critical to breaking the cycle of poverty.
Finally, with Rwanda’s rapid pivot to the East African Community, the English language has become integral to both education and commerce. By focusing on four key skills – listening, speaking, reading, and writing, our revised program strategy is creating an immersive learning environment capable of giving our students the confidence they need to succeed. According to Naomi, our English Enrichment Fellow, English education in Term 1 of 2017 was both fun and innovative. Reviewing the basics of speech, verb tenses, and introductions, our youngest students expanded their English vocabularies. One student named Diane even managed to read 20 novels in just six weeks. As they get ready to tackle storytelling and reading comprehension in Term 2, our latest Enrichment Year has already gained the solid foundation they need to master the language.
In the ten years since we first broke ground on our Village, your compassion and abiding support have allowed us to transform 1,130 young Rwandans into true leaders and ethical change-makers. As we enter our second decade of operation, we hope that you will stand by us in making a difference for the children of Rwanda.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
