Engineering Education for Social Enterprise: The Case of Post-conflict Rwanda

In this chapter, we propose an engineering education for social enterprise programme for post-conflict Rwanda. The programme consists of four facets including the critique and deconstruction of current ways of teaching engineering, the cognitive conflict resulting from either the ‘assimilation’ of new experiences into what students already know or the ‘accommodation’ of a new experience by altering an existing schema, the creation of alternative solutions as a result of the critique undertaken and cognitive conflict experienced, and the culturally responsive service-learning pedagogy for delivering the programme. The latter would help engineering students to develop entrepreneurial skills as they learn, and it is expected they would use those skills to create their own businesses and become self-employed upon graduation. This model programme is timely given the fact that current unjust engineering education in Rwanda, modelled on and ‘benchmarked’ against existing programmes in the Global North, has failed to address the wicked problems of poverty and underdevelopment that were aggravated by war and genocide in the country. We hope our model can address the economic underdevelopment and social injustices brought about by Western engineering in other post-conflict and developing countries.