Stories

Eustache Nshimiyimana is a teacher at Sainte Anne (Rwanda), a pre-school and primary school founded in 2014 by the Oblate Sisters of the Assumption in the east of the country, 200 kilometres from Kigali.

The school currently has 500 students, taught by 26 teachers, including Eustache, who relied on the possibilities of digital education for teaching his students during COVID-19. His dedication was later rewarded with a national award for the use of ICT in the classroom.

With the advent of COVID-19 confinement in Rwanda, Eustache was able to adapt the way he continued to teach his pupils and not suffer from learning delays despite the educational barriers. 

As a solution to the problem, this Rwandan teacher used ProFuturo materials to set up a teaching system he called the “Home Learning Programme”. 

In his project, Eustache contacted his students’ parents to register their phone numbers in the ProFuturo system along with their email addresses so that each of his students could continue their academic activities without interruption. Through this system, this teacher was able to teach his students remotely by sending ready-made lessons and other activities via these smartphones.

According to Eustache, this practice facilitated and promoted individual teaching, in which each pupil became responsible for his or her own learning. In addition, the ProFuturo material allowed him to better monitor the progress of his various activities, as the material contains the assessment system for the success of all activities already carried out.

Among the advantages of using ProFuturo materials, Eustache highlighted the time savings, the use of better methods to keep students active and the identification of errors and learning difficulties of some students in order to find solutions in a short time. 

Thanks to this innovation linked to the good use of the ProFuturo material, Eustache Nshimiyimana won a national prize in 2022 in a competition looking for a Rwandan teacher who had made an innovation in his or her teaching practice. To achieve this, Eustache had to go through the different levels of competition (school, sectoral, district, provincial and finally national) to finally be the chosen winning teacher and recipient of a motorbike as a prize from the Ministry of Education.

Lucie Nyirahakizimana, Headmistress of Sainte Anne school, acknowledges that the partnership with ProFuturo has enabled them to gain a strong reputation for their school nationally in terms of the use of technology and among the pupils’ parents in particular. 

At the level of the pupils, Lucie is clear: the ProFuturo material has become a stimulus for them to learn. The students’ interest has created a great spirit of curiosity and research in them. 

ProFuturo came to Rwanda in 2019. Our digital education programme has been expanding rapidly throughout the country as it is closely aligned with the Rwandan government’s education policy, which is strongly committed to the use of technology in primary and secondary education. Education in Rwanda has been an instrument that has contributed to the country’s economic and social development. ProFuturo is now being implemented in 180 schools in 17 of Rwanda’s 30 districts.