Rwanda experienced one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. The 1994 genocide against the Tutsi resulted in the deaths of an estimated 800,000 people and caused mass displacement (Rwanda Ministry of Education, 1998a, 1998b). It also caused severe damage to the national educational system: destroying school infrastructure, killing and displacing teachers, and causing traumatic scars on the education community. It had a direct impact on the educational attainment of those who experienced it, initially estimated at a loss of 0.5 years of schooling (Akresh and de Walque, 2008) and later revised upwards to 1.2 years (Guariso and Verpoorten, 2019). Studies have even documented the educational impact on children who were in their mothers’ wombs at the time (Bundervoet and Fransen, 2018).

Analysis of censuses and household surveys since 2000 shows the magnitude of the impact on educational development. Throughout the 1980s and until the genocide, the primary completion rate was growing at the rate of one percentage point per year and had reached 49% by 1994 if very late completers are included. It is estimated that the primary completion rate fell by one-third, reaching a low of 33% by 2000. Since then, sustained government efforts that placed education at the centre of the development agenda, with strong external support, have put Rwanda on an accelerated path. The primary completion rate has grown by two percentage points per year, twice the rate before the genocide. By 2024, it is estimated that about 69% of 14- to 16-year-olds (i.e., those three to five years above the official graduation age) were completing primary school, although ultimately about 81% are estimated to complete primary school if very late completers are taken into account (Figure 1). However, this estimate may need to be adjusted in view of developments after 2020.

This gap between the ‘timely’ and ‘ultimate’ primary completion rates has fluctuated around 15 percentage points during the past 40 years. This is a sizeable gap, which indicates that repetition is a significant and persistent challenge (Laterite, 2019). Only 38% of students completed primary school in six years (Rwanda Ministry of Education, 2024a). The repetition rate fell from 18% in 2007 to 12.5% in 2012. After a short-term increase between 2012 and 2016, it fell further to 10% in 2018. But the repetition rate jumped to 30% in 2021. Disaggregated by grade, repetition is highest in grades 1 and 5 (Figure 2a). The effect of this bottleneck is a decline in the number of students who sat for the final examination at grade 6 by 28% between 2019 and 2023 (Figure 2b).

Education has been seen in Rwanda as vital for the nation’s recovery. It was prioritized as an engine for reconciliation, reconstruction, and socioeconomic progress. Improving infrastructure, retraining teachers, and revising curricula to promote unity and peace were early priorities (Obura, 2003). The Vision 2020 and Vision 2050 frameworks and subsequent policies have reflected a commitment to ‘leave no child behind’ (Rwanda Government, 2012, 2020) that has shaped educational policies and interventions. Key milestones have included the introduction of free primary education of six years in 2003 and extended to nine years in 2007 to include lower secondary education (World Bank et al., 2011). This policy change explains the sharp increase in the primary examination pass rate from 22% in 2007 to 74% in 2008 (Figure 2b). There has been a succession of five-year education sector strategic plans, beginning in 2004; the two most recent ones have covered the periods 2018/19–2023/24 and 2024–2029 (Rwanda Ministry of Education 2018; 2024).

The government has placed good governance, accountability, and development at the heart of its quest for political legitimacy in all sectors, including education (Williams, 2017). As part of a decentralization reform that began in 2000, the central government, while keeping oversight of planning, policymaking, standard setting, and monitoring, transferred responsibilities to districts through a results-oriented governance process based on performance contracts, known as imihigo, which has been credited for early progress in service delivery (Honeyman, 2017). Nevertheless, there was a noticeable decline in funding, with the share of education in total public expenditure falling gradually from 18.8% in 2000 to 15.6% in 2008, 13.7% in 2014, and 10.8% in 2018. This created challenges, leading the government to increase the share of education in total public expenditure to an average of 14% between 2021 and 2025 to address three key areas: infrastructure, teachers, and school feeding.

Progress in building new primary schools was slow until the late 2010s. An average of 40 primary schools per year were constructed during the 2000s, increasing only slightly to 50 per year in the 2010s. Classroom overcrowding, even combined with widespread double-shifting, had become a serious problem. The student/classroom ratio in government and government-assisted primary schools increased from 60:1 in 2005 to 83:1 in 2020 (ranging from 107:1 in government to 72:1 in government-assisted schools).

As part of the 2018/19–2023/24 Education Sector Strategic Plan and with the support of a World Bank concessional loan, some 1,100 new schools were constructed despite the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was 200 more schools in a 5-year period than had been built in the previous 20 years. The total number of public primary schools almost doubled, from 726 in 2017 to 1,327 in 2022/23, and their share increased from 25% to 35%, as the number of faith-based schools remained largely unchanged. The number of classrooms, which grew by 15,000 between 2007 and 2018, expanded by 22,500 in this period, helping the student/classroom ratio to fall back to 60:1 in 2024. Moreover, between 2017 and 2022/23, there were rapid improvements in other school infrastructure quality indicators: on-grid electricity (from 56% to 78%), access to safe drinking water (from 46% to 69%), access to tap water (from 53% to 80%), and single-sex toilets (from 71% to 96%). The student/desk ratio fell from 5:1 to 2:1 (Bennell, 2025).

Rapid expansion was facilitated by a local innovation. In 2009, the government introduced the Home-Grown School Construction Approach, a distinctive solution, heavily based on mass community mobilization, coupled with effective central and local government backstopping with respect to planning, funding, and monitoring. All new classrooms and schools were constructed with this approach. A key feature of the programme was off-site construction, whereby classrooms were constructed according to high-quality, modular and standardized designs and prefabricated in dedicated factories, which allowed simultaneous site preparation that shortened the overall project timeline by 30% to 50%: all buildings were delivered in six months. The unit cost of classroom construction was around USD 100/m2 compared to USD 2700/m2 for conventional, externally funded projects. Small and medium-sized local contractors were used, which boosted local economies. Local education officers and communities had the autonomy to exercise their own initiative to tackle implementation problems as they arose (Bennell, 2025).

Similar decisive action has been taken since 2019 on teacher recruitment. Between 2000 and 2019, primary school enrolment increased by 75% from 1.4 million to 2.5 million students, but the number of teachers increased by only 66% from 26,500 to 43,900. But challenges had been noted in attracting and retaining teachers in rural areas (Monaco, 2016). An estimated 20% of teachers were leaving their jobs every year (Zeitlin, 2020). In 2019, the government set a target of hiring 29,000 teachers. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of teachers increased by 17,000 (i.e. as many teachers were hired in 2 years as in the previous 20 years). Another 8,000 were hired by 2023, while 5,000 more teachers were expected to be recruited in 2024/5 (Africa Diplomacy Network, 2025).

Such a massive recruitment drive was not straightforward. In two successive rounds in December 2019 and July 2020, only 2% and 15% of applicants, respectively, managed to pass the hiring examination. The government had to change the recruitment criteria: applicants were hired only on the basis of their academic transcript but appointed to one-year trial contracts (KT, 2020).

A third large-scale policy that the government has implemented in recent years is school feeding, which has been shown to have a positive impact on student achievement (Tei Mensah and Nsabimana, 2025). The national programme was scaled up in 2020/21 and by 2022/23, 93% of primary school students were benefiting from school meals. Critically, the government was covering 93% of the cost with its own funds, having tripled the size of its contribution (Global Child Nutrition Foundation, 2024). In September 2022, a new directive capped parents’ contributions to school feeding at RWF 975 per term (USD 0.60) to reduce disparities and support vulnerable families (Rwanda Ministry of Education, 2022).

Given these important developments, the recent increase in repetition and the corresponding decline in graduation examination participation, which are slowing down the rapid progress between 2000 and 2019, may appear counterintuitive. It is possible that COVID-19 played a role in the observed bottlenecks. However, the main reason seems to be a change in the language of instruction policy.

Rwanda is unusual among African countries for having one national language spoken by everybody, Kinyarwanda. Yet it was declared as language of instruction only for grades 1 to 3 upon independence in 1962, followed by French in higher grades. Between 1978 and 1991, Kinyarwanda was named the language of instruction through all eight years of formal education. Following the 1994 genocide, English was added to French as a language of instruction in 1996 and named an official language in the 2003 Constitution. In 2008, English was mandated as the language of instruction at all education institutions levels (Tusiime et al., 2024). As the move was not pedagogically sustainable (Kral, 2024; Laitin and Ramachandran, 2024; Ukobizaba et al., 2025), Kinyarwanda was reinstated as the medium of instruction in the early primary grades in 2011. However, in 2019, the national language of instruction policy once again mandated the use of English as the medium of instruction from grade 1 onwards. The link between language and repetition has received political attention (Uwayezu, 2025), with large-scale remedial education one of the measures introduced to address the challenge (Rwanda Ministry of Education, 2026).