All’s Well In School. But Come University, Rwandans Wonder: Where Are the Women?
Rwanda’s young women aren’t making it to university. Cultural and societal factors are to blame.
Growing up in Kigali, Peace Ndoli Iraguha was tenacious, driven, determined—and smart. She fit right in as a student at the prestigious Gashora Girls Academy of Science and Technology and never doubted she’d go on to university.
Everything went to plan, but there was one surprise: When Iraguha stepped on campus at the University of Rwanda, she found herself wondering where all the women were.
Just one-third of the students overall at the University of Rwanda are women; with those numbers rising or falling depending on the specific college.
Iraguha was in the College of Medicine and Health Sciences, where there was a slightly better gender balance than some of the colleges, she explains. But at the School of Engineering, Iraguha estimates that a mere handful out of her grade of some 50 students were women.
The numbers fell further as women dropped out to get married or because they were pregnant, said Iraguha. “Every single time we came back from break, there were fewer women in class.”
The gender gap Iraguha observed at her university is not uncommon. In fact, it extends across all tertiary education in Rwanda. But it’s a gap that persists despite the country’s long-standing efforts to promote girls’ and women’s inclusion in education as well as society more broadly.
In the three decades since the country’s genocide and civil war, the Rwandan government has recognized that while it has more young women than men completing secondary education—indeed girls are outperforming boys at various levels—the numbers of young women going for higher education have remained below the African average.
World Bank data from 2024 show that just 6.1% of women in the country go on to tertiary education, compared with 7.9% of men. In 2019, just 27% of STEM students in Rwandan higher education public institutions were female, while only four in 10 students enrolled in tertiary technical and vocational education training (TVET) in Rwanda were female. (Though to be sure, the numbers for men are not particularly high either as many skip university to start work in Rwanda’s agriculture-based economy.)
Rwanda, of course, is not unique in this: According to UNESCO data, just 8% of women across Sub-Saharan Africa are enrolled in tertiary education versus 10% of men. But for a country that has made good strides in gender parity when it comes to primary and secondary education, the numbers are surprisingly low.
It’s also somewhat surprising in a country that has achieved gender parity in its government: Rwanda’s legislative branch has had a women majority since the 2008 election when 56% of women were elected to parliament. That number now stands at over 60% with 55% of ministerial positions held by women.
Chaste Niwe, the managing director for Bridge2Rwanda, an education and leadership nonprofit that works to get Rwandan students into tertiary education both in country and abroad, says he is shocked by the numbers. “Each year we interview between 400 to 500 of the top students in the country [for 80 spaces] and the girls are doing significantly better than the boys,” he said, adding that his program’s intake is between 50% to 55% female. So the broader trend he finds, “very surprising.”
Efforts by Rwanda to address this problem include creating partnerships with international academic scholarship programs and trying to make higher education easier to access for young women. Without taking specific action, the pool of educated young women for significant governmental positions–as well as other high level positions in the private sector–will remain low.
A Terrible Look Back
Thirty years ago, genocide devastated the country. In a killing spree that lasted from April to July, over 800,000 people were murdered–mostly members of the Tutsi minority–because of decades-long anger over the Tutsis who had long-dominated politics. Families and neighbors, wives and husbands, women and children were all drawn into the horror.
The terror also gave Rwanda its first female head of state: Agathe Uwilingiyimana served very briefly after President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down in April 1994, and before she herself was killed.
By July 1994, the country’s infrastructure had been ripped apart. Rebuilding would start at ground zero. Two-thirds of school structures were significantly damaged and an estimated 75% of public sector employees, including teachers, were either killed, fled the country or were missing.
In its wake, a new government under President Paul Kagame saw education and gender equality as a means to improving social cohesion (essentially getting people to talk to one another again), and made girls’ education, in particular, a priority.
Why girls? Because the country, even as far back as the 1950s (post independence), had made fairly good strides when it came to having girls in school and there was an understanding, certainly by the mid-1990s, that getting girls into school was a smart thing to do.
There was and is a sense, explained Suzanne Sinegal McGill, the president and co-founder of the Gashora Academy, that Rwanda has “these amazing leaders, both men and women, that we need to nurture, because we need everybody that has skills and something to offer to help to build” the country.
Countless Blockers for Women
But it’s clear, even today, that multiple societal and cultural factors are holding women back from opting into higher education. They include things like a bias towards early marriage, the prevalence of teen pregnancy, poverty and a disproportionate number of household responsibilities falling to women.
School subjects become more challenging in the upper grades, requiring more study, but girls tend to get blocked from putting in the time because of household responsibilities—and so the achievement gap widens. In fact, by the time girls are taking the entrance exam for public universities they’re doing so much unpaid labor in the home, that studying can become almost impossible. Their scores are depressed and they fail to make the cutoff for much sought after places in public universities.
With that avenue restricted, the options dwindle to “expensive private institutions, which are, in most cases, cost-prohibitive, and of varying quality,” notes the academic Elizabeth C. Reilly in her 2021 paper, “Rwandan Women in Higher Education: Progress, Successes and Challenges.”
A further problem persists for women based on the idea that if you can’t see it, you can’t be it: By secondary school only 31% of teachers are women and that number falls to just 19% in tertiary education. Research has consistently shown that in education, it is critical for students to see role models of their same gender. If young women are not seeing females teaching them, especially in STEM subjects, it’s harder to imagine their own possibilities in those fields.
Jane Umutoni, a Rwandan Ph.D. candidate in education at the University of Glasgow, found, along with two colleagues, that family tradition tends to be another key blocker: Rwandan families often choose to fund education for their sons but not their daughters. Why invest in girls when they’ll be married off to join their husband’s family—or so the logic goes. “It is still a patriarchal society and [change] will take time,” she said.
The problem is exacerbated in rural areas where there is even less support for girls pursuing higher education. “If you are coming from a rural part of Rwanda, people want you to get married, so the idea is still foreign in most parts of the country,” explained Chelsea Uwase, a Rwandan University of Chicago graduate who now works for Bridge2Rwanda.
So powerful is the expectation that a woman should serve as a “home caregiver,” that she’s simply “not afforded that opportunity to take six or eight years out of [her] life to get a higher education,” said Rebecca Zeigler Mano, the co-founder of HALI Access Network, a pan-African coalition of nonprofits focused on getting low-income students into university.
“I feel like the ones who make it through are so driven,” she said. “They have the tenacity to persist despite all of these pressures from culture, economy, early marriage, society and religion.”
Tina Muparadzi, the executive director of the Mastercard Foundation’s Education and Transitions programming platform told me there is a great need for “immediate interventions” to help young women who want to enter higher education.
In fact, removing barriers to young women's participation today could add $287 billion to Africa's economy by 2030.
“The solution requires a multi-faceted approach: increasing scholarship opportunities, creating second-chance education programs, and developing more role models in the education sector,” she said.
Progress Report
Is there room for hope?
In as far as both the Rwandan government and local education organizations remain invested in improving the numbers of young women in higher education—yes.
And there is drive and determination, too.
“We get like 800 applicants for 90 spots, and they are all really good applicants,” said Hillary Carey, the executive director of Rwanda Girls Initiative, the fundraising arm for Gashora, the elite girls boarding school in Rwanda. Families, she said, are realizing education “is just as important for my daughter as it is for my son.”
Other things that are helping: affirmative action programs for women, expanded scholarship opportunities, the provision of better access to safe university accommodation, and a focus on ensuring professors treat women and men equally and fairly, which can be as minor as how a professor speaks to a student or ensures her ideas are heard.
Umutoni and her colleagues who published a report on these issues in 2022, noted that soon after its release, the University of Rwanda asked them to come up with a gender policy for the institution. “With all the effort that is put in, there’s a lot that’s going to change,” she said. “How we were 10 years ago is not where we are right now. It will take time, but things will get better.”
As for Peace Ndoli Iraguha, she went on to co-found—and win an award for—the online wellness platform Lifesten Health. She completed her Master’s degree last year. She appreciates the government’s efforts despite its limited funds and resources. But, she says, “they had to start somewhere.”
Josie Cox
Josie Cox
Holly Baxter
