The students at Gikondo Campus are facing many challenges that hinder their education. The campus lacks enough basic facilities to provide a smooth and conducive learning environment.
For students getting facilities such as chairs, study halls and writing boards can be compared to looking for a needle in a haystack.
The campus lacks enough chairs for students, which force some of them to stand throughout their classes. Moreover, some classes have almost 180 students and you find congestion in classrooms where they get filled up and other students only have an option of standing by the door peeping into the room with the hopes of hearing what the lecturer says.
This issue discomforts students and they are forced to spend the first thirty minutes moving around the whole campus block looking for chairs.
“I just can’t explain how stressing it is to come all the way from home to school with nothing in my mind other than the hope that I get a chair to sit on. When I fail to get one I am forced to stand throughout the class.” Said Bella kabatesi, a first-year student.
It is likely that these issues result from the relocation of the universities made by the institution. If it the case, then perhaps the school should have planned ahead and find a solution.
However Mike Karangwa, the Public Relations Director of University of Rwanda said that the institution is aware of the problem and they are doing all they can to provide solutions.
“The challenges that the students face has been brought to our attention and we are doing all we can to provide a solution. We are expecting a total of 450 chairs to be brought in from Nyagatare of which 250 of them have already arrived and we distributed them to some classes”, said Karangwa.
He further explained that when it comes to classrooms, the officials of the different schools at the Gikondo campus will have to create a new timetable and put in classes which do not conflict as well as allocate classrooms based on the number of students.
“We will soon create new timetables having in mind the number of students per class. If the students are a big number we will give them a class that sits them all comfortably so that they can all be allocated the available facilities. We will also make sure that the timetables of the different schools do not conflict”, explained Karangwa.