Initial work to establish the institution was undertaken by Professor Paul Davenport, a member of Paul Kagame's Presidential Advisory Council, who now acts as chair of the university's board of governors. The University of Rwanda was established in September 2013 by a law that repealed the laws establishing the National University of Rwanda and the country's other public higher education institutes, creating the UR in their place. Law number 71/2013 transferred the contracts, activities, assets, liabilities and denominations of seven institutions to the UR: the National University of Rwanda ; the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology ; the Kigali Institute of Education ; the Higher Institute of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry ; the School of Finance and Banking ; the Higher Institute of Umutara Polytechnic ; and the Kigali Health Institute. At the time of its creation, education officials reported that they "hoped that the university will improve the quality of education and effectively respond to current national and global needs". Eugene Kwibuka of the Rwandan newspaper The New Times reports that many of the university's senior managers are well-established scholars with records of improving the performance of their previous institutions, but that many of them "are also well known elite Rwandans or dedicated friends of Rwanda and advisors to President Kagame who have recently contributed to the development of the education sector in Rwanda or have recently been involved with designing the newly created University of Rwanda". A key challenge facing the university is argued to be a lack of qualified lecturers. A 2015 article published in the Annals of Global Health, for example, notes that in the School of Public Health, part of the College of Medicine and Health Sciences, a barrier to the university merger's goal of improving the quality of higher education teaching and research in Rwanda is "limited skilled academic staff". The School employs six PhD-level and six master's-level faculty, as well as five research assistants. Moreover, it delivers a large number of degree programmes and has a "disproportionate student-supervisor ratio" of 15 students per PhD-holding faculty member. The university leadership plans to increase the proportion of academic staff holding doctoral degrees from 20 per cent to 60 per cent by 2024. In February 2019, it was announced that the university would start offering a master's degree in Kinyarwanda.
Organisation and administration
The head office is, along with the College of Business and Economics, in Gikondo Mburabuturo. It is organised into six subject-based colleges:
College of Arts and Social Sciences
College of Agriculture, Animal Sciences and Veterinary Medicine
, the university had 30,445 students, of whom 28,875 were undergraduates and 1,570 postgraduates. 99.4 per cent of UR students are Rwandan nationals. It employs 1,450 academics and 816 support and administrative staff. UR participates in a number of international collaborations. In February 2015, the University of Rwanda and Michigan State University launched a joint MSc degree programme in agribusiness, assisted by United States Agency for International Development funding. The programme aims to help Rwandan women establish themselves in agribusiness. The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency is funding research capacity development in Rwanda through the university.
Noted people
, Rwanda's health minister, became the first person to be awarded a PhD by the new University of Rwanda in August 2014. Binagwaho, whose research concerned children's health rights in the context of HIV/AIDS, started her PhD in 2008, prior to the university merger.
