Meet Uwayezu, a Rwandan lecturer inventing a global teachers’ welfare project

Elias Hakizimana Sep 28, 2018Sep 30, 2018 0 Comments

By Elias Hakizimana.

Theoneste Uwayezu, a lecturer and Country Director and legal representative –Pioneer of teacher connekt Initiative has created a technological based project called “teacher connekt” that aims to promote teachers’ wellbeing through working together.

The project will benefit all teachers in developing countries.

He is also the president of focus on mothers and children (FONMAC) organization.

“In our project, we need to gather all teachers worldwide together so that they find ways of improving their work and making extra money. We realized that teachers are the ones who have a big role in raising our children; and our organization caters for children and mothers. We also revealed that teaches in developing countries have not enough capacity to make money and our countries depending on their capacity cannot increase teachers’ salaries, so, we thought on how we can find solutions from within though our daily works,” Uwayezu said.

**Uwayezu explaining his project to colleagues who participated to e-learning conference on September 27, 2018 in Kigali Convention Center.**

He said for example that a teacher can have an idea of making other businesses like commerce by using his income as a capital.

“Many teachers in our countries are intelligent, they write books but they cannot sell them. We will boost a network that can help a teacher to sell electronically his/her book, teachers will also be lucky to teach online and get paid through this network.”

He said that a teacher can be able to conduct online consultancy and get money without travelling.

The project in now working in ten countries including those from South America, Asia and Europe and five African countries are ready to work with the Teacher connekt.

“We would like to see teachers helping each other in one community (teacher connect) and serve people with quality products that also support teachers’ welfare. We have partners in Bolivia in America, we have others partners in Cambodia in Asia, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kosovo and Sweden,” Uwayezu said.

“After having enough number of members and understanding the rationale of being together in network, we want to implement teachers’ ideas that are constructive towards economic development and start supporting them through a committed fundraising initiative. For example, I can have an idea to build a school in a remote area and when I share it to my colleagues in this network we can contribute $5, 10$, $20 to implement the idea; imagine when we are for example 500,000 or a million of members…” he noted.