Why CMU is in Rwanda and not Nigeria – Rugege

In 2011, US-based private research university Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), after signing a 10 year partnership with the Rwandan government established an African campus, the only one of its kind on the continent.

Crystal Rugege, Director of Strategy at what is now known as CMU Africa, in an interview with BusinessDay in Kigali, gave insights into one of the most significant public-private partnerships impacting higher education in Africa today, how it all started and goals for the future.

I am a graduate of the Carnegie Mellon University campus in the United States.

In my final semester, I was approached by the Dean of Engineering after they had been in conversation with the government to establish a branch campus of Carnegie Mellon University here.

So that was my first job out of graduate school when I completed my masters. I have been with the university for 11 years. I spent two and half years developing the blue print for how we wanted to engage and then moved here in December 2011 to start the university and get it running.

For the past 25 years, the government has been really intentional about its vision for creating a knowledge economy with the right conditions to do that and recognising that youth and young people are really its most abundant resource. I was bought by that vision.

The strategy has been to develop high quality human capital while using technology as an accelerator for developing growth across all sectors.

So, when the government approached CMU back in 2017, prior to me coming on board, it was something that was exciting for us because we do have other international campuses but one of the core tenets of CMU is to try to improve the human condition at the global scale through education, research and innovation.

So, given that Africa is the youngest and fastest growing continent in the world and also the opportunity to have a presence in one of the most progressive countries in the continent, leading the way on many fronts and prioritising the investment on young people, in education, research, innovation and entrepreneurship was really something that was very exciting. So, it wasn’t a very difficult decision for us to come here.

We started actively in 2012 and were sold on the government’s focus on high quality education and technology. We believe it is one of the fastest paths to development.

The government was very particular about what degrees we wanted to offer. We offer two masters degrees one of which include masters in Information Technology and our students with that degree can decide to focus on different areas such as machine learning, fintech, agricultural technology, engineering. They have a wide range of IT and how it applies to different technology and different sectors.

The second degree is in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Most of the students in that degree programme are largely interested in Energy but also things like embedded systems and Internet of Things, for example drones.

We currently have students from about 20 countries but 19 across Africa. We have had some American students. That number continues to grow year on year. We have many students from Nigeria and they do quite well. We have had four students from the US and have moved here to start companies. Two went back to the US and came back because they became interested in the technical system and the opportunity to engage here. The ease of doing business for people to start businesses and start new ideas is also key. The country is trying to position itself to be attractive for our international students to stay after graduation to start companies, experiment and test certain ideas with the intention to either move back to their own countries or across the continent.

We have about 16 students and graduates in total. We have seven alumni so far and nine that are current students.

Our Nigerian students are doing very well. There is one who just finished in May and he has been accepted for a PHD programme at the Oxford University. So, he started a couple of months ago doing his PHD in Human Centred Computing. We have another Nigerian at another top university in the US also doing his PHD. We have one at IBM and you know IBM has two resource labs, one in South Africa and another in Kenya. We have another Nigerian student there as an artificial intelligence engineer who is also doing well. We started out with a random student population but there was always the intent to be a resource for Africa. So, in the last three to four years, we have really seen a lot of growth in terms of international students and it continues to grow yearly.

We have been very lucky that we have a very close relationship with industry. One of the unique things about our programme is that it is the same degree that is offered in the US, meaning that someone who finishes here, the degree looks exactly the same with someone who finished in US. It means he has a globally recognised credential and it means that they can compete at a global stage. We have complete academic and operational autonomy that we can maintain the right standards. We also need to be contextually relevant and so, lot the research that our faculty engage in and a lot of the projects that our students work on particularly when we invite industry to present us with problems so that the students can work on them; this is where they get the applicability within the African context because we want to make sure that they are solving challenges that are relevant in the environment where they are.

We see that even when they graduate.  The three gentle man from here that are working on IBM research are working on problems that are specific in Africa. This has really been something that we promote among our students and alumni to have them engage in solving African problems. Because of that close relationship with industry, we have enjoyed a very high placement rate. About 10 percent go into PHDs, another 10 percent are engaged in start-ups. In fact, one of our start-ups just went through the last round of interviews at in Silicon Valley. I just saw an article last night that they have been able to raise four million dollars for a start-up that they have with other colleagues from across the continent and the other 80 percent are working in Africa and around 30 percent of those working go into leadership positions immediately after graduation. So, we found that while our programme is small, it has been very impactful. We recently did an impact assessment of our programme because we are eight years in.

There is an interesting research from the International Labour Organisation, where it looks at the multiplier effect of educating highly skilled engineers. The multiplier effect of educating one highly skilled engineer translates into 20 to 30 additional jobs in a local economy, depending on the economy we are talking about. It will be lower in a smaller economy like this but imagine what it will be in a larger economy like Nigeria. We have been really proud to be able to contribute to the knowledge economy not just Rwanda but in the continent. This is our first semester in this new campus but it will allow us to scale up to 350 to 400 students. Our current student population is 150, so we will be able to more than double that. We are also looking for ways we can achieve economies of scale by maximising on the infrastructures executive education just to build on the fact that we have this wealth of knowledge and really creating a community of research and innovation.

Rwanda had the first mover advantage. The Nigerian government never approached CMU. We go to Nigeria almost every year to recruit. So we like to see more students from across the continent to benefit but really the story of CMU Africa started in Rwanda.

It started with the vision of the government and with them approaching the university to say they would like them to come here. All our international partnerships have started that way, where we have been invited to come into that space.

It is important that we are responsive to demands that have been pre-identified and so the fact that the government was asking us to come in and specifically respond to this deficit of technology and engineering skills and also the fact that they weren’t saying just do this for Rwanda.

From the very beginning, it was the government’s decision for this to be an African Centre of Excellence. So, while it is relatively small, I would say if we are able to venture into other countries, we wouldn’t want to offer the same degrees or replicate what is here. We would want to build on the existing infrastructure.

The government is funding a large portion of the operations. We also have other funding partners that provide scholarships and also provide operational support to the university. We are actively always looking for funding partners to become self-sustaining.

We are always looking for partnerships in terms of scholarships and research.

The end product students in CMU Africa receive is the same as in the US, so the cost is also the same. The director of this programme in Rwanda was here with us before he travelled to India yesterday . He has been with the university for 40 years. So from his masters to his PHD to his entire teaching carrier, he has been with the university. So, the hiring of staff, the recruitment of students and the conferring of degrees all sit within CMU Pittsburgh to ensure that we are able to maintain the same standards.

Because the quality is the same, the tuition is the same with those studying in Pittsburgh.

The current tuition fee is around 40,000 dollars but all African students that are admitted to our programme are eligible for some form of financial aid and because we have some funding partners, will say around 80 percent get full scholarships and 20 percent get some form of partial scholarship. So, there is no student here that does not have some form of financial aid. Everyone is charged the same tuition, so everyone is eligible for scholarships, loans etc. For Rwandans, they are guaranteed some certain package of scholarship and this is provided by government but we also fund Rwandan students through external partnerships.

Someone who has a degree in broadly technology areas, engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, electronic engineering and so on are eligible to apply.

We also have some interesting students. For instance, we had one person who had a Bachelor’s degree in Food Science but he had a very strong background in statistics and he had also taught himself programming. He did very well in our IT programme. So, we won’t dismiss anyone but we actually look for certain technical competences because we want to make sure that we are not admitting people who won’t be able to succeed in the programme.

We offer broad disciplines in terms of our degrees but students can have areas of concentrations. For instance in Science and Machine leaning.

There is a global deficit of skills in that area and that is something we offer expertise in. Financial technology from Crypto currencies to block chain are also taken here. We are also looking at the applicability of technology in the most important sector. So, as I mentioned, there is research around the application of IT in the health and agriculture sectors. There is a project that started as a class project but has morphed into a company since the students graduated. What they do is use sensors to access the quality of tea to help farmers improve their yield. This is the application of technology in agriculture. If you look at health for instance, we have done research around looking at pharmaceutical cells and able to correlate that with the outbreak of malaria using machine learning techniques.

So, we try to make sure we are teaching cutting edge technologies but very applicable within this context.

For most of the projects that have been borne out of class, we have 15 start-up companies that have come out of CMU Africa so far and some of them are doing great businesses. There is a company founded by seven co-founders who are all CMU alumni from Kenya but they decided to start here and looking to expand but I know they just got approval from the central bank to release a payment product. There are certainly innovations that are coming out from just class projects but ideas that come from our alumni even after they graduate.