Africa-Press – Rwanda. Equity Bank Plc in partnership with AIESEC Rwanda, on Wednesday, October 20 launched a programme that will aim at bridging the skills gap of students transitioning from university to the workforce.
The programme dubbed ‘the bridge programme’ aims at addressing youth unemployment in Rwanda where students in their final year at the university will be trained in different areas and learn more about the job market.
Malik Uwase, country director of AIESEC said that the programme will equip students with the necessary skills they need after the university in order to be able to join and compete at the job market seeing that they have no working experience.
“Every year more than 9,000 students graduate and they all need jobs but the biggest challenge they meet is that most universities teach hard skills and ignore the soft skills that are needed at the job market,” he said.
“For instance all these students have the knowledge they acquired from the university but you find that most of them sometimes do not know how to pitch their ideas, plan or simply write CVs and that is why we started this programme to help them acquire these skills that are needed to find employment.”
Uwase added that the trainings will start next month, with the first cohort of 300 students who will be trained in two groups; the first being of students who want to be employed and the other group being of students who want to be entrepreneurs and will learn about business development where they will be helped by Equity Bank and other partners as well.
“For now we have started with students from the University of Rwanda but we plan to expand to other universities as well while reaching out to various employers in the country to give them professional internships or employ them” he added.
Dianah Mukundwa, head of investments and social impacts at Equity Bank Rwanda said that Equity Bank is ready to provide these young people with financial education, entrepreneurship and digital literacy.
Equity Bank Plc in partnership with AIESEC Rwanda launched a programme that will aim at bridging the skills gap of students , on Wednesday, October 20
“When we train the youth we are bringing up the next generation of leaders and business people and what we intend to do is train them, mentor them, teach them how to incubate their ideas, and financially support them if possible,” she said.
“This is also an opportunity for us as well because it is our duty to help the youth redefine their values and help them maximize opportunities, and be socio-economically independent, and through this programme, these young people will be able to transform their communities as well as the country” she added.
Brenda Umutoni, students’ representative at the University of Rwanda said that the programme will help them as students know what kind of skills they need to land jobs and not bypass any opportunity available to them, adding that other universities and other organizations should adopt such training to help other students as well.
