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Bridge2Rwanda, an American Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Rwanda Development Board, have initiated a programme to offer preparatory lessons to high school graduates who qualify for scholarships in American universities.

The Executive Director of the Higher Education Council in the Ministry of Education, Prof. Geoffrey Rugege, said the programme is aimed at enabling Rwandan students access US scholarships.

"The Ministry of Education fully supports the initiative by Bridge2Rwanda. The advantage of getting a good score in TOEFL, SAT, GRE and GMAT is that an American university can give you a scholarship if you pass the tests very well," he observed.

The organisation has an International Training Centre, which offers elementary classes for various university entrance examinations that include Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), SAT Reasoning Test, Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) and Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT)

The programme targets a second group of students for the 2012 intake who emerged among the best in the 2011 secondary school examinations.

Anna MD Reed of Scholars Project commented: "At Bridge2Rwanda, our goal is to build bridges between the US and Rwanda, changing lives on both sides".

She pointed out that in 2009, the NGO learnt that Rwanda had been offered a number of full scholarships to elite US universities, but the Ministry of Education had to forfeit them as it could not identify any students capable of passing the standardised tests to the required levels.

"We were surprised to hear that Rwanda had to give up these scholarships," Bridge2Rwanda Operations Director Blayne Sharpe noted.

"But these are tests that everyone has to prepare and study a great deal for in order to do well, and until recently, Rwanda had no test preparation courses available and nothing at all that was designed, especially for Rwandan students".

With the desire to help students succeed in international exams and show they are qualified to attend US universities, the NGO designed a programme to help the best students succeed.

"The International Training Centre aims to offer the best test preparation classes, admissions and scholarship counselling and other international training classes in the region," Sharpe said.

"In terms of helping our students improve on university entrance exams, our early classes have produced great results, because of our resources, expertise, partners and students.

If we only helped our students to get the scores they need but did not give them counselling on how to apply or on where they are qualified to apply, they would find the process very difficult".

Sharpe stated that for the first group of scholars, the hard work had already begun to pay off. Two of the students have already begun four year university education in the US, after being awarded scholarships worth more than US$100,000 (Rwf 60, 000,000) each.