Our Story
Hello ladies and gentlemen,
It is my great honor to have you visit this page. Our story starts with the problem we’re trying to solve, which targets two categories:
Target 1: Experienced Professionals
Background
Look around you, if you were born in Rwanda or any other African country, who is at the helm of your local’s engineering industry? Is it a domestic or a foreign company?
Chances are foreign companies, right? It might be a Western, Chinese, or another Asian giant. The fact is that seeing a local company leading engineering practices in their home country is unexpected and surprising.
There could be a variety of reasons for this, including political and international relations, but my question is whether local companies or professionals are well-equipped to compete with these foreign companies. My nearly a decade of experience leading construction design and execution contracts has given me the confidence to say NO.
I’ll explain this without incorporating VR, AR, and drones into infrastructure because it may be too complex for some readers to grasp.
The world has embraced CAD in engineering, which is an ancient design technology that is limited to but not a full package of 3D capabilities. Later, Building Information Modeling (BIM) emerged as a technology that empowers businesses with the full set of 3D, 4D, 5D, 6D, 7D, and 8D, and now the new trend is Digital twin technology.
Look around your country, how many local companies are using at least 4D applications in their projects if you are from Africa? In Rwanda, there is no local company that uses 4D, whereas other Asian and Western countries can implement different workflows up to 8D.
According to a study released by United BIM in June 2020, found no country in Africa is encouraging the use of BIM, whereas Scandinavian countries regulated its use in 2002.
Root Causes
1.
None of these technologies are taught in universities, necessitating the need for a robust training system to supplement traditional education. However, policymakers are unconcerned.
Yes, they don’t care because, when you look at what’s going on in the training industry, the only established and supported system is training for uneducated or semi-educated people, while we need a powerful training system for degree holders in this 21st century like never before.
On the other hand, some leaders believe that if a civil engineering degree holder is good at mixing and casting concrete, that’s all for a competent engineer. If so, who will perform engineering analysis and Multiphysics simulations of structures, I wonder?
2.
Government technical employees are falling behind; we discussed BIM dimensions up to 8D above; if you go into one of the government entities in charge of infrastructure and ask one engineer for how many BIM dimensions are in the market and what they can help, very few will be able to answer it.
This is terrible because government employees should be ahead of private sector employees in terms of knowing what is best for the country. These technologies enter the market to assist clients, including governments, in saving money that would otherwise be spent on projects due to outdated workflows, but many decision-makers don’t care.
Target 2: College fresh graduates
Background
Fresh college graduates are graduating with obsolete skills that are no longer useful in the modern economy, once they reach the market they don’t know where to start. This is causing some of them to abandon their careers. That is why, in Nyabugogo shops or downtown, you will find mechanical engineering graduates selling shoes and civil engineering graduates working in Papeterie.
This is a big problem because if things continue as they are, who will build skyscrapers in our cities? Who will study, verify, inspect, or review the railway that will be built from Tanzania to Rwanda and across East Africa?
Foreign firms or skilled laborers are the answer. So, will bringing in these foreign companies and laborers solve our problem of unemployment among educated youth? Absolutely not!
Root Causes
1.
In colleges, you will find a lecturer with a good master’s degree in structural engineering who will teach you structural design and analysis skills that you should have before applying for a job at a private company outside of college. This lecturer graduated with a first- or second-class bachelor’s degree and immediately received a full scholarship to pursue a master’s degree. After earning a master’s degree with distinction, he entered the job market and found a position teaching civil engineering students in a college.
The lecturer went to the job exam. first, lets us understand who and how this exam was prepared. We are all aware that it used to be manual and theoretical. No college takes into account projects a candidate delivered on the job market when hiring a lecturer. Now, how can someone who has never handled even a G+1 project will teach students how to deliver a diversity of projects to the point where a company will trust them? For a graduate to be trusted by employers and capable of handling projects, they must first go through a strong and diligent training system. Otherwise, it’s all a failure.
2.
Traditional education is rigid. Educational leaders continue to be comfortable despite market changes and technology taking over the majority of all operations.
I can confirm that traditional education will never meet the needs of the labor market as long as changing one chapter of the curriculum takes 5 years and requires sequential requests and multiple meetings.
How Nziza Training Academy is a solution
All of these issues inspired the opening of Nziza Training Academy, which teaches the same programs as those found in technical colleges but with different goals and approaches. That is why the majority of our courses are named like college courses; we go sector by sector and train on how projects are delivered and the trending skills that are in use.
Our efforts have been limited to the architecture, engineering, construction, and manufacturing industries to make sure we keep our focus narrow with massive results. One of the strategic solutions is to provide local practitioners with technological skills that allow them to deliver high-quality results in project studies, which is something educated people should be doing.
We bring the world’s leading engineering and design technology companies to the region, along with highly trained instructors with decades of practical experience, to ensure that they train in accordance with international standards of practice. Our professional training programs provide trainees with a solid foundation on which to build their careers. With the computerization of business and non-business processes in the current decade, the only career solution is the right technical knowledge and skill set, which is what we provide.
There has been a lack of trustworthy sources for learning about current job market trends. Some young people conduct research to learn about what developed countries do and how they do it. However, there was no center for learning those skills and technologies prior to Nziza Training Academy.
We came determinedly with the power of the world’s leading technology accreditation, prepared local engineers with unrivaled experience through firsthand training from accreditors, and then provided them with a platform to train other people locally while gaining access to international certifications.
We didn’t stop there; we needed to show the public that we know what we were doing and that it was a tried-and-true solution. That’s when we established a subsidiary consulting firm to handle megaprojects that are known to be handled by foreign firms only.
Our first project was the design development of Rwanda Polytechnic’s IPRC Gishari Masterplan, an around 100 billion Rwanda francs project on 45,000 square meters that was delivered entirely by locally trained young men and women engineers for the first time in Rwandan history.
We are still bidding on mega-tenders to demonstrate to the government and public that our system of training people in what is directly applicable to the job works. We are not only in the buildings, but also in roads, bridges, manufacturing, water, energy, and other areas where there is a skill gap between local practitioners and international standards of practice.
More information on the international-level training we conducted in various areas can be found on the in-the-news page as we continue to strive for our vision of ending skilled labor imports in developing countries, beginning with Rwanda.
Thank you very much for your time and understanding. Jah bless!
Please share with us what you think about our initiative. Email: education@nzizatraining.ac.rw
Regards,
