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Seventeen-year old Liliose Buto Peace is a 12th grade student in a public secondary school, FAWE Girls’ School managed by the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE School), in Kigali, Rwanda. She is one of 2,000 students receiving scholarships as part of the Ambassador’s Girls’ Scholarship Program (AGSP).
Peace was born in Kenya in a family of Rwandan refugees who came back to their ancestral land in 2003. Peace joined the FAWE School in 2004. “Now, my parents had to pay my school fees every quarter because secondary education is not free. Having moved to Rwanda a year earlier and still trying to establish a life here, raising school fees was a struggle for my parents. There were times when we were late on our payments,” Peace remembers.
Worried about having to drop out from school for lack of money and to ease the financial burden on her parents, Peace started to inquire about opportunities to get external support for her education. From other students, Peace learned about the AGSP, a key component of the U.S. President’s Africa Education Initiative that aims to address the constraints to the millions of school-aged children in Africa who do not attend school, with the majority of latter being girls. At the time, there were 29 students at the FAWE School who were receiving the scholarship. [Note: The total number of students countrywide who were receiving the AGSP scholarship in 2004 was 1,500. The current number of the FAWE School students who are receiving the AGSP scholarship is 57.]
Subsequently, Peace talked to the school headmaster and found out more details about the program and what it took to become a beneficiary. She applied for the scholarship; and in 2005--based on her excellent academic performance and the economic hardships of her family--Peace became a beneficiary of the scholarship. According to Peace, the scholarship that pays her tuition, transport to and from school, stationery, toiletries, and some pocket money was an enormous financial relief for her family that was trying to make ends meet.
Peace proudly notes that she is taking science subjects: mathematics, chemistry, and physics as her majors and that she is getting high grades. Doing well in science subjects, let alone being enrolled in school, is a great achievement for a girl like Peace in Rwanda. Although the country has made significant strides toward ensuring equal access to education for girls and boys, girl students continue to lag behind in educational achievement and access, particularly at the secondary and tertiary levels.
Peace is fascinated with science and dreams to become a doctor or an engineer so that she can apply science in her life for the benefit of her countrymen. Science subjects are practical according to Peace, as Rwanda is trying to develop its science and technology in pursuit of its goal of shifting from an agriculture-based to a service-based economy. She asserts that “With sciences, you study about things that exist around you; and through experiments you can develop your own things.”
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