Kigali
Education

In colonial and pre-genocide Rwanda, Butare was the country's principal centre for tertiary education. Early colleges such as the Nyakibanda Major Seminary, founded in 1936, and three 1960s establishments including the National University of Rwanda (UNR), were all located in the southern city. The first higher-education institution in Kigali was the Institut Africain et Mauricien de statistique et d'économie appliquée, which was founded in 1976, but the city did not become a major centre of learning until the second half of the 1990s. At that time, the public Kigali Health Institute (KHI), Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), and Kigali Institute of Education (KIE) were founded, along with private universities the Kigali Independent University (ULK) and the University of Lay Adventists of Kigali (UNILAK). Further institutions were added in Kigali in the 21st century, including the public School of Finance and Banking (SFB) in Gikondo and the private University of Kigali, as well as branches of foreign universities such as Mount Kenya University and Carnegie Mellon University 's college of engineering. As of 2018, there were a total of 50,594 students enrolled at tertiary institutions in Kigali, with a total of 28 separate campuses.

In 2013 the government implemented significant changes in the country's public university system, intended to improve efficiency by removing duplicated courses of study and eliminating discrepancies in student assessment between the different schools. The previously independent Kigali institutions KHI, KIST, KIE and SFB were merged with three others from outside the city—the UNR, Nyagatare-based Umutara Polytechnic and Ruhengeri's Higher Institute of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry —creating the consolidated University of Rwanda. It has six constituent colleges, spanning nine campuses, three of which are in Kigali. These are the Gikondo campus, which serves as the university's headquarters and is home to its business and economics programmes, the Nyarugenge campus on the former KIST site, which houses the sciences, architecture and engineering, and the Remera campus which covers medicine, nursing, dentistry and health sciences.

In 2018 Kigali had 239 primary schools with 203,680 pupils enrolled, and 143 secondary schools with an enrolment of 60,997. The large rate of drop-out between primary and secondary, a phenomenon which occurs across Rwanda, is attributed by the Ministry of Education and UNICEF to insufficient numeracy and English skills in primary-school finishers, cost, the need for children to contribute to household labour, and insufficient teaching resources. The city's three districts occupied the top positions in the national table of exam results at primary level in 2019, although this success was not replicated at secondary level in which rural districts were the top performers. The top-three performing individual secondary schools offering the Rwandan syllabus— FAWE Girls' School, Petit Séminaire St Vincent de Ndera, and Lycée Notre-Dame de Cîteaux —were all in Kigali, however. The city also has a number of private schools, which target wealthy Rwandans and expatriates, including the Green Hills Academy, École Belge, and the International School of Kigali. These schools, which charge high fees, offer international programmes such as the International General Certificate of Secondary Education and the International Baccalaureate which enable students to study at universities worldwide.

On 14 September 2022, the government announced that, starting with the academic year 2022–2023, parents will no longer pay school fees for students in pre-primary and primary, however, they will contribute Rwf975 for school feeding program. This will help parents with limited means be able to send their children at school.
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