Rwanda National Police (RNP) and the University of Rwanda (UR) have entered an agreement for the latter to reinforce the force’s specialized education policing programmes.
The Memorandum of Understanding which encompasses all Colleges under UR was signed on February 24 at the RNP headquarters in Kacyiru between the Inspector General of Police, Emmanuel K. Gasana and Prof. James Mcwha, the Vice Chancellor of UR, who signed on behalf of their respective institutions.
The signing event was also witnessed by Amb. Valens Munyabagisha, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Internal Security and senior officers in the force.
The agreement comes to strengthen the existing partnership, following the signing of the MoU with the Colleges of Education, formerly Kigali Institute of Education in 2007, College of Science and Technology, former KIST and College of Arts and Social Science previously NUR in 2011, which operated independently at the time.
The new partnership under one university will therefore focus mainly on exchange of lecturers, staff and researchers to support the running of the National Police Academy (NPC) programmes.
Other areas will include mutual assistance in the establishment, development and validation of programmes and exchange of information relevant to policing training.
IGP Gasana noted that “RNP has a vision to ensure safety and sustainability of the nation to serve the people with integrity to realize sustainable development.”
“RNP will realize its mission and vision because of the servicemen who are trained and professional. We therefore need to learn more and respond to modern policing challenges efficiently, a reason why we give more value to this partnership as a winning symbol,” he noted.
Prof. Mcwha observed that this is a “turning point” for the two institutions.
“Rwanda is a very fortunate country and its police force has a tremendous reputation and we will help develop that reputation further, to help them understand what the issues are in the society and to support them in developing latest technologies to be used in policing in areas of computer science, ICT and psychology,” Prof. Mcwha said.
“In the past, we worked with police in terms of computer and social sciences. All these areas will continue to be important and we will develop new areas.”
He added: “This is to continue the work that happened previously with institutes that now make up the University of Rwanda, but it will go much further than that. We will engage more closely with the police in terms of training more officers and in terms of conducting research in many issues we see in society and community, and that in turn will assist in the development of policy so that policing policy can benefit from that research.”
The Former KIE supports the force in Professional Police Studies, former KIST was in ICT while former NUR was leading the extension of a Bachelor of Law.
NUR, through its Centre for Conflict Management, also conducts Master’s degree in Peace Studies and Conflict Transformation at NPC, which has benefited police officers from African countries under the Senior Command and Staff Course.
Commissioner of Police (CP) Felix Namuhoranye, Commandant of NPC noted that the school wants to put much effort in areas of forensic science, professional police studies, criminology, information security and computer science.
“Instead of teaching law, we will now shift to teaching on how to use the law to conduct professional police work which will now become criminology and law. We also want to emphasise the use of computer science so as to combat IT-related crimes like money laundering,” CP Namuhoranye said.
This partnership comes at the time when the force is more focused and engaged in training as a vital road to professional policing.
The force currently boosts of three schools; National Police College in Musanze District, Police Training School (PTS) in Gishari, Rwamagana District and Counter-Terror Training Centre in Mayange, Bugesera District.
RNP
UM– USEKE.RW
