Practical training for gastronomy
and catering professionals

Rwanda is an important destination for tourists and business travellers

The Rwandan economy has been growing strongly for several years, and the tourism industry is now picking up where it left off before the coronavirus epidemic hit. Tourism now generates around 25 per cent of Rwanda's foreign exchange earnings. Good flight connections, modern convention centres, hotels and sports facilities are also helping to attract more and more international visitors to the country. However, hotels, restaurants and catering companies lack more than 50,000 well-trained kitchen and service staff. Growth in the sector is being held back as many vacancies in the kitchen and catering sector cannot be filled with sufficiently qualified applicants.

A training institute for gastronomy

Under the name Institute for Culinary Arts and Nutrition (ICAN), the Rwandan NGO Solid' Africa is setting up a training institute that will offer training for the entire range of kitchen staff – from chefs to kitchen assistants. Solid' Africa also produces around 9,000 free meals a day for hospital patients in its canteen kitchens and sells over 4,000 meals to various customers such as companies and catering organisations. It is an important pillar of the Rwandan healthcare system but suffers from a shortage of gastronomy and catering specialists. Solid' Africa is mainly financed by donations from Rwanda and abroad.

The six-month courses at ICAN were developed together with international partners and are strongly modelled on professional practice. The relatively inexpensive and streamlined training programmes are intended to increase the number of potential trainees and enable them to enter professional life quickly. The NGO Chancen International has also agreed to offer the trainees loans on favourable terms.

In addition to the training programme, further training for hotel and restaurant kitchen staff is to be offered during evening and weekend courses. Official accreditation of the programme is planned. The teachers are to be recruited locally and prepared for their work through a training-of-trainers programme. The training centre is being built in Kigali. On three floors it will include five training kitchens, a bakery, storage rooms and offices.

Solid' Africa is planning to invest a total of 1.53 million euros in this project. The Facility Investing for Employment is providing a grant of 1.1 million euros (72 per cent). The funds will be used to finance the construction of the ICAN building and the technical equipment for the training kitchens.

The Facility Investing for Employment (IFE) of KfW Development Bank is part of the Special Initiative "Decent Work for a Just Transition" of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). With its support, the Facility wants to remove barriers that prevent the creation of new and better jobs in the private sector in the African partner countries.