By making and selling school uniforms, the Mpanda Youth Training Centre is able to fund the purchase of training materials.

Activities
Partners
The Mobile Shop
Success Stories

The Mpanda Youth Training Centre in Rwanda helps poor youth aged 14 to 20 learn a trade and grow and develop in their own community.

Béata Nyirakarera came to work early this morning. She has a big order to fill. She looks around her shop, filled with a deep sense of satisfaction. She has four sewing machines and a serger. She enjoys the enthusiasm of the two workers she has just hired. Like Béata, these seamstresses have a diploma from the Mpanda Youth Training Centre. The diploma has changed their lives as they can now meet their families' needs. Béata is single, and she is proud she can send her sisters to school and help her family in a thousand and one ways.

The Mpanda Youth Training Centre is one of about fifty unofficial technical schools throughout Rwanda. Youth training centres are for poor youth aged 14 to 20 who have left the formal education system for a variety of reasons. Youth training centres give young women and men a year of vocational training tailored to the local job market.

Activities

The Mpanda Youth Training Centre is located in the heart of Rwanda, near the city of Gitarama. In 2005, some 102 young women and 314 young men were enrolled there. The students can choose from among the following vocational tracks: sewing, cooking and food processing, masonry, joinery, welding, and electrical. The training includes two mandatory weekly courses in agro-husbandry, as well as a two-month internship.

Named Ubumwe (“unity”), the centre is housed in a modern building with a coordinating office, a restaurant, a hairstyling salon, sewing and basketry shops, and a henhouse. About 50 graduates, who have not yet found jobs, can work there to earn an income.

Life has often been cruel to these young people. But the sports team teaches them to respect others and to resolve conflicts peacefully. By practising traditional drumming and dance, they rediscover Rwanda's cultural values. They learn to express emotions that are hard to put plainly into words. In short, everything is done to help them integrate into society and the workforce.

The Mpanda Youth Training Centre plays a key role in gender equality. The centre's director, Gilbert Ndangamira, explains: “Rwandan culture does not favour education for girls. Yet we have shown that girls do very well in school.”

Partners

From 2000 to 2004, the project to integrate Rwandan early school leavers was implemented by the firm Tecsult-Eduplus and was financed by the Canadian International Development Agency. The project helped the Mpanda Youth Training Centre in several ways: it helped build and renovate the training centre building; it procured educational tools; it trained teachers and introduced the cooking and food processing vocational track. As well, it formed a group for Mpanda's women graduates. Cégep de Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu helped to add the welding and electrical engineering vocational tracks in 1998.

The Mobile Shop

The mobile shop is another example of the centre's remarkable vitality. The mobile shop has a twofold objective: it generates revenue for the centre, and it also helps trainees to enter the workforce. How does the mobile shop operate? Its managers seek joinery, masonry, welding, or electrical engineering contracts in the community. They call on young graduates to perform the work. Graduates can thus develop their skills, gain experience, and earn a wage.

Success Stories

About seven out of ten Mpanda graduates are able to enter the non-agricultural system. Most find work at shops in surrounding cities and towns. Some, like Béata, prefer to start their own business. Others form production associations. The key to success is sound management, active involvement of parents and local authorities, and—last but not least—the centre's committed staff. Aimé Balihuta, mayor of the district of Ntenyo, sums it up best when he says, “The work of several dedicated collaborators, such as Canadian cooperation, is very important. But the centre's real strength lies in what Rwandans have done and must continue to do for themselves”.