Jean Marie Vianney is a lead teacher for the Kepler program in the Kiziba United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) refugee camp in Rwanda. He has been a teacher with the program for the past two months, and prior to that, taught in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, also with Kepler.
So far, teaching at Kiziba has been a positive experience, Vianney told Diverse.
“Kiziba students find Kepler to be an opportunity that just comes once. They had no hope to get to a university, but once Kepler came, they found it to be another opportunity,” Vianney said. In Kiziba, there are three primary schools and one secondary school, he explained, which means that few refugees have access to a secondary education, let alone higher education.
Kepler is a postsecondary educational program first established in Kigali in 2013 by the nonprofit organization Generation Rwanda. Students selected for the program receive on-site classroom instruction, along with online course programming.
At the completion of the program, they are awarded either an associate or bachelor’s degree from Southern New Hampshire University’s online degree, College for America. The Kiziba branch of Kepler officially launched in August 2015 and is funded in part by the IKEA Foundation.
So far, 16 students have graduated from the Kigali campus with a bachelor’s degree, and 97 more have obtained an associate degree. The majority of Kepler graduates and current students also have already found full-time employment while still attending Kepler.
“We’re looking for students who are very smart, and wouldn’t normally have access to higher education,” said Chrystina Russell, SNHU Vice President for Global Engagement. “So it’s a very unique group of students that we’re serving.”
