Kigali, 4 May 2016
President Kagame today received Peter Kramer, owner of the Marine Service Group and Co- Founder of Schools for Africa. The Peter Kramer Foundation, working together with the Nelson Mandela Foundation in collaboration with UNICEF have kicked off fundraising to raise $ 80 Million to help African girls, orphans and vulnerable children go to school.
President Kagame said Peter Kramer’s support had had made a big contribution to the education sector not only in Rwanda but Africa as a whole:
“We need this kind of support that even goes beyond education. It’s about the broader investments to grow our economies and linking countries. Education is very broad. It’s about access; you want as many children to have access to education, but it’s also about quality, where you want the quality of education to keep improving and also infrastructure. All these require and consume lot of resources and this is the case for the entire continent. This is always work in progress.”
After paying a courtesy call on President Kagame, Peter Kramer said his foundation was happy to work in Rwanda where efforts to help children from poor families and vulnerable children go to school are quite advanced.
“When we met with President Kagame 10 years ago we had an in-depth conversation about education development in Rwanda and the progress today is quite remarkable looking at the enrolment levels of this country’s young people. We are delighted to work with the Rwanda Government and UNICEF to add our efforts to what Rwanda is doing in the education sector.”
The Minister of State in the Ministry of Education, Olivier Rwamukwaya said that the Schools For Africa initiative had made a big contribution to the improvement of education in Rwanda, mainly through the Community Led Early Childhood Centres, teachers mentoring programs to improve their English skills and curriculum development.