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Where we do it > Rwanda - Laetitia Jan

Name: Laetitia Jan
Role: Organisational Development Adviser, SNEP
Location: Kigali, Rwanda

Whilst teachers are needed in Rwanda, they are hugely undervalued. Wages are not only minimal, but are often paid months late. Added to this, working conditions and resources are notoriously poor. Union representation is vital to raise the status of the profession and to give teachers a voice.

Syndicat National des Enseignants du Primaire (SNEP) is a primary school teachers’ union in Rwanda. It was formed to help negotiate terms and conditions for teachers as well as helping to raise awareness of the issues that affect teachers – status, motivation and performance.

VSO volunteer Laetitia Jan went to Kigali, Rwanda in February 2006. Coming from a management background, Laetitia was tasked with improving the way SNEP was run. This would ensure not only an increase in union membership, but also the capacity in the office – better IT, filing and basic bookkeeping skills – to deal with this uptake. As Laetitia says, ‘SNEP hasn’t advanced a great deal since its inception ten years ago. To get it operating I have to start with the basic things and work my way up from there: how to use computers, how to organise files. Then there’s a lot of membership recruitment, which is the business of their budget, each teacher pays about 10p each month and that’s the basis to pay for operations and wages. So I taught them how to go about and recruit members, organise their leaflets and all their brochures.’

Juliet Myers, Education Programme Manager for VSO Rwanda has seen the impact SNEP’s work has had on teachers in Kigali, ‘SNEP is getting more trust from teachers who are now more motivated. We’ve noticed that teachers feel like something is going to happen within the next two years. They are also more confident about their wages going up and they feel like they have a voice, like they’re looked after, like someone cares. It looks like the work Laetitia is doing will leave a legacy of improved work conditions and primary school teachers being more valued.’

The union’s presence and the increased contact with teachers have already realised benefits: ‘when I arrived SNEP had 1,000 members. Now we have 12,000.’ Laetitia sees the reason for the increase in members as a simple one: going out and talking with the teachers. ‘Every day we go to schools in and around Kigali trying to get teachers to sign up. The gains we made in the uptake of teachers are significant and it will have a knock-on effect with the students, because they will eventually have a better standard of teaching and hopefully more resources. It’s fantastic seeing work you’re doing actually making a difference to so many peoples’ lives.’

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