Learning Chinese brings more opportunities for young Rwandans

A group of 15 students are learning Chinese language in a bright and spacious classroom, with plants overflowing in the courtyard outside the college of Education of the University of Rwanda located in Remera, one major suburb of Kigali.

The Confucius Institute has been the pioneer to provide a comprehensive platform for Chinese language and which is devoted to participants from different socio-economic categories as a move to promote Chinese culture and language in the tiny East African nation, as part of Sino-Rwanda bilateral relations.

"It originated in Rwanda in 2009," says Mark Zhang, director of the institute that has seen over 3,500 students graduated in these Chinese language program.

Thirty-two-year-old Cedric Ndizeye who graduated from the institute in 2013 is impressed by his overall enhancement and ability to speak in Chinese.

"Apart from speaking Chinese, the one-year program helped me to understand more about Chinese culture in many ways. I am now became among the few Rwandans citizens to speak Chinese," Ndizeye told Xinhua.

Many Rwandan graduates from the Confucius Institute who spoke to Xinhua in an interview believe that One of the benefits of the program is improved knowledge of Chinese culture from different perspectives, along with opportunity to go there to study and meet people and also learn more about China.

Speaking in the same vein, the director of Confucius Institute at the college of Education of the University of Rwanda, Mark Zhang said that the purpose of Chinese language program in Rwanda aims especially at teaching young Rwandan people about how they can use their own mind and using acquired language skills to think and to communicate with Chinese people.

"We are emphasizing to help these young people [in Rwanda] who are keen to discover the outside world by emulating Chinese entrepreneurial skills so that in the end, they become resourceful enough to depend on themselves," he told Xinhua.

Among participants in this one-year training course include university students, politicians, civil servants and business people.

"But now, I want to learn more languages to be more competitive on a job market," Ndizeye told Xinhua.

Ndizeye's experiences are among the thousands of unemployed young Rwandan people, where nowadays new vacant positions are limited in both public and private sectors.

Official statistics from the latest Housing and Population Census indicated that the country's unemployment rate is at just 3.4 percent among the general population.

Although a large number of fresh Rwandan graduates are forced to undertake longer internships to acquire skills required by the market, but it doesn't help much.

This is because unemployment among the local Rwanda population is largely created by investors who employ competent labour under the pretext that Rwandans lack necessary skills even as universities are training students to respond to the needs of the labour market.

In a move to address some of these challenges, the director of Conficius Institute in Kigali explains that the Chinese language training program was introduced to give skills to selected Rwandan community groups in order to give value to their resource for the international market.

"Customers on a global market need people able to speak many languages including Chinese where communication remains the main tool used in business to bring people closer," Zhang said.

Currently, the diversified African Confucius institutes work with sister colleges across most African countries through educational exchange program that has seen large number of fresh young Rwandan graduates being awarded scholarship to pursue their studies in various disciplines in Chinese universities.

In addition, Chinese language was until recently being taught as an informal training language in Rwanda, but now the Rwanda's Ministry of Education is assessing together with the University of Rwanda to introduce some curriculums in mandarin Chinese language by next year.

"We hope that within this move, people from Rwanda will be able to learn from different cultures perspectives include Chinese," Zhang said.

The Chinese senior lecturer believes that there needs to be a fundamental shift for younger generation in Rwanda to go outside to learn something positive from China.

According to him, such an approach would look holistically at how to integrate young people in the economy and create new generations of entrepreneurs, while giving them a chance to emulate experience of their Chinese peers. Endit