APA – Kigali (Rwanda) – Academic institutions in Rwanda should adopt proper mechanisms to produce high-quality research instead of committing to plagiarism, a senior official from Rwanda’s Higher Education Council (HEC) pointed out Wednesday.
Dr Rose Mukankomeje, HEC Director General told participants at the 6th international Conference on Environment, Energy and Development (ICEED2023) taking place in Kigali that research is critical for sustainable development when it has a positive impact on the community.
“plagiarism is still rampant in the academia in Rwanda and many lecturers pretend to be promoted to high academia titles without deserving this,” Dr Mukankomeje pointed out.
In Rwanda, the official regulation within academia instructs that plagiarism by students or researchers is considered academic dishonesty and offenders are subject to academic censure.
“If we are talking about sustainable development, it implies that one needs to innovate (…) fake [academic] papers and degrees are everywhere, but in Rwanda we have more (…) nowadays some universities are teaching online,” Dr Mukankomeje pointed out.
While encouraging researchers not to be a burden for the country, Dr Mukankomeje criticized the way some researchers in Rwanda are not making efforts to learn how to write research proposals to apply for grants.
“In Bachelor’s they don’t know how to do research, in Masters, they copy here and there without sense of innovation (…) everybody in the academia wants to copy and paste but we are wrong in pasting,” Dr Mukankomeje said while referring to the situation in Rwanda.
Rwanda accounts for about 50 tertiary education institutions, ten of them public and the rest private.
CU/as/APA