18 December 2025
New smart classroom for Katarara School!
With the support of the German Embassy in Rwanda, the largest school in our project area, with 2,300 pupils, has been equipped with a modern smart classroom.
Katarara School offers all classes from primary school to A-levels. Over 2,300 pupils are enrolled. The existing smart classroom was in very poor condition. The laptops were eight years old, not powerful enough for upper school students, and many were simply defective. Working with 4G internet was also sometimes a test of patience.
The headmaster and we at the Sustainable Villages Foundation jointly approached the German Embassy in Kigali to apply for funding from the Small Projects Fund. With success!
The embassy provided just under EUR 18,000. Over the past two months, the money has been used to completely renovate the classroom, increase security against burglary, and purchase eight modern computer desks for group work and 45 chairs. The IT equipment consists of 30 brand-new HP Windows 11 laptops and a fast internet connection. An existing projector was hung from the ceiling and projects onto a new screen.
Thanks to our architect Daniel Schmidt, who designed the furniture and the redesign of the classroom, upper school pupils now work in a modern, motivating environment with state-of-the-art technology instead of in a gloomy room, and are connected to the world via the internet. This smart classroom is another building block in our strategy to create an ecosystem for continuous IT education in our project area.
However, the old laptops, insofar as they still work, will not end up as electronic waste. At the beginning of 2026, another smart classroom is to be set up in the primary school. The old laptops are sufficient for the primary school pupils' first steps on the computer.
Sustainable Villages Foundation has received commitments from other donors to build four classrooms at Musovu Primary School in the first few months of 2026, one of which will be a smart classroom, and to set up a smart classroom at Kabukuba Primary School. Primary schools in Rwanda cover grades 1-6.