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Friday 29 December 2017

Radio Rango 90.7FM - The Alex and Kerrsey Show by Alex Rowlinson

Click here to listen to the: The Alex and Kerrsey Show  by Guramrit Guron 


Alex and Kerrsey at their work experience placement 
Over the week of work that the students did, they gained hands on experience in a variety of different activities; from accountancy to telecommunications to computer skills and they gained an official certificate, which will help them in the professional world. The placement has also been beneficial for their school Regina Pacis, as their program now has high quality opportunities for the students, so future students will also receive the same benefits. RBA has gained a link to their community as a work experience provider, so may find that some of the students later decide to work full time for the institution, and we have every reason to believe that next year they’ll be in partnership again.”

Across Rwanda, currently 23% of all secondary school graduates are unemployed. Many students finish their education with good grades, however, still find themselves hard pressed to gain employment as they have no work experience. Inspired by our own experiences of compulsory work experience in the UK, which not only provided us with references but also ideas about what we might want to do when we grow up, we decided to propose a work experience programme too.
We treated this as a pilot programme, a trial to see if the concept would be suitable. With sustainability at the core of all our endeavours, we chose a school who would have the capacity and willingness to continue the programme after we left, and thus approached a local secondary school, Regina Pacis, who already encouraged students to do work experience during their holidays. However, the placements that were offered to students here were often in small businesses and local shops, they didn’t provide the students with a challenge or good training. Therefore we sought to find higher calibre institutions and businesses nearby that could give both engaging and varied work to the students in their final two years of high school in areas relevant to their studies, for example, business or tourism. With this goal in mind we made a proposal to the school and sourced opportunities in the town of Huye. 
To facilitate these placements we agreed to arranged to pay for the students’ travel and food costs, and to give them an official certificate afterwards as proof of their hard work. To ensure that results could be repeated again, we knew we needed to create a network between the school and every place of work we secured, so that year on year the school could refer pupils to placements.   
We found the students placements at a variety of places; hotels, the local court, a national museum and two radio stations. 
The RBA Placement
RBA, a local radio station, were keen to get stuck into the programme and offered two of our students, Alex and Kerresy, a five day placement working across different departments of the radio station, with a particular focus in the accountancy department. 
Alex and Kerresy were soon learning about marketing strategies and advertising before visiting the news department where they were given sessions on how RBA discovers news stories, the organisational structure of RBA and it’s history, how radio stations communicate information with each other, how to keep records, balance budgets, as well as further in depth lessons on accounting. 
With introductions over, RBA decided to allow the students to take the lead on some projects and use their own initiative in combination with the training they had received over the past two days. They were put in charge of RBA’s petty cash scheme, where local businesses could ask for money for small projects. They even got onto the radio to host the youth segment and speak live on air about the question of “If you were the president, what would you change?” This chance to take the lead was both exciting and rewarding for the students, and they impressed the institution, including the CEO, with their aptitude. It was at this point that we decided to work with the students to create our very own radio for our ICS blog - Rango Radio, 90.7FM. 
Both of them were extremely pleased with what they had done and the radio station itself, saying “It was like working for a family. Everyone was such good people, and I’ve learnt so many skills from the fieldwork and practice. I’ve made new friends too.” Without our input the students also went and requested another week of work, which is a great sign of their success! 
We felt programme was extremely cost effective. Our only expenses were the 7500 RWF bus fare and food allowances per students and minor overheads for admin and our travel. Considering this yielded 40hrs of training for each student, it was a productive use of our budget.
We did encounter some difficulties as not all institutions were receptive. Some simply did not get back to us and some did not have staff on premises with the authority to authorise work experience. On occasion, the places of work needed to be reminded to make the placements active and allow the students to do more than just observe.  
Could we expand the project?

The project was relatively simple to start up and coordinate and formed only a small part of our overall work in Huye. However we feel that it could be easily expanded to be the sole focus of an ICS placement, or as an intervention run independently from ICS by one of its partner agencies in country, bearing in mind the limitations entailed with school holidays. 
For future development of this project, we could expand the time-frame of the program, potentially expanding it to be a summer/winter school for work experience with many different placements. We could use more of our budget for this project; providing for travel costs to further away institutions, to  pay for guest speakers, to have the volunteers prepare weekend workshops and perhaps have the students pitch their own business ideas for a prize of start-up capital. If we extended the dates we could have it last a month and have the students cycle between institutions, giving them a wide range of experiences and references. This would be cost effective and still have the double benefit of providing training for the students and creating community networks locally.  Focusing entirely on this project could provide a high calibre program to tackle youth unemployment to those who need it most. 


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