Rwanda’s Education System: New UNESCO Report Details Post-Genocide Progress but Highlights Soaring Repetition Rates

Kigali, Rwanda – A new UNESCO 2026 Global Monitoring Education (GEM) Report on Rwanda, titled “Addressing the impact of major enrolment expansion in RWANDA,” outlines the nation’s extraordinary recovery and growth in its education sector following the devastating 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, while also bringing attention to a significant and recent challenge: a dramatic spike in student repetition rates.

The report details the catastrophic initial impact of the genocide, which resulted in a severe loss of infrastructure, teachers, and a decline in the primary completion rate from an estimated 49% in 1994 to a low of 33% by 2000.

A Decades-Long Accelerated Recovery

In the years that followed, sustained government efforts placed education at the center of the national development agenda, leading to an accelerated path of recovery. The primary completion rate has since grown at twice the pre-genocide rate. By 2024, an estimated 69% of 14- to 16-year-olds were completing primary school, a testament to the nation’s commitment, encapsulated in frameworks like Vision 2020 and Vision 2050. Key milestones included the introduction of free primary education in 2003, extended to nine years in 2007.

The government’s strategic investment and decentralized governance model, known as imihigo (performance contracts), have been credited with early service delivery progress. However, the report notes a gradual decline in the education sector’s share of public expenditure, which fell from 18.8% in 2000 to a low of 10.8% in 2018. This trend was reversed with an increase to an average of 14% between 2021 and 2025 to address three critical areas: infrastructure, teachers, and school feeding.

Infrastructure and Teacher Expansion

The push to expand school infrastructure has been particularly decisive. Due to classroom overcrowding, the student/classroom ratio had climbed from 60:1 in 2005 to an alarming 83:1 in 2020 in public and government-assisted primary schools. To combat this, the government, with World Bank support, constructed approximately 1,100 new schools between 2018/19 and 2023/24—more schools built in five years than in the previous two decades.

This rapid expansion was facilitated by the innovative Home-Grown School Construction Approach, which utilized mass community mobilization, modular design, and off-site prefabrication to significantly reduce costs (around USD 100/m2 compared to USD 2700/m2 for conventional projects) and shorten project timelines to just six months. These efforts successfully reduced the student/classroom ratio back to 60:1 in 2024.

Similarly, an ambitious teacher recruitment drive was launched to address the growing enrollment. While primary student numbers increased by 75% between 2000 and 2019, the teacher count only grew by 66%. Between 2019 and 2023, Rwanda hired an additional 25,000 teachers, significantly boosting the workforce.

The report also recognizes the successful scaling up of the School Feeding program. By 2022/23, 93% of primary school students were benefiting from meals, with the government covering 93% of the cost. A September 2022 directive further capped parents’ contributions to ensure support for vulnerable families.

The New Bottleneck: Language Policy and Repetition

Despite this rapid progress across key indicators, the report reveals a counterintuitive and concerning trend: a sharp increase in the repetition rate, which is slowing down overall educational momentum. The rate, which had fallen to 10% in 2018, jumped to 30% in 2021, with the highest rates observed in grades 1 and 5. This bottleneck resulted in a 28% decline in the number of students sitting for the final examination at Grade 6 between 2019 and 2023.

The GEM Report suggests the main reason for this reversal may be a change in the country’s language of instruction policy.

Rwanda has one national language, Kinyarwanda. However, the language of instruction has seen multiple changes over the decades. In 2019, the national policy once again mandated the use of English as the medium of instruction from Grade 1 onwards.

The report indicates that the link between this language change and the spike in repetition has received political attention, with the introduction of large-scale remedial education programs to address the ensuing challenges.