Lack of experience among teachers and requisite facilities at homes and schools have been attributed to inability of e-learning to take off across the country.

Financial challenges faced universities and students have made access to Internet and electronic gadgets impossible for the e-learning to take off.

Although online learning, via radio stations, televisions and video calls is going on in urban primary and secondary schools, the model has not worked at institutions of higher learning.

A mini-survey by Rwanda Today in four private universities and seven colleges of the University of Rwanda found that the institutions are facing attributed to financial challenges as thousands of students have not enrolled for online learning.

In addition, the universities are also grappling with non-payment of salaries to staff due dried up revenue streams.

Rwanda Today has also established that thousands of first-year students on government sponsorship in all university of Rwanda colleges had not received laptops at the time schools closed to prevent the spread of the virus.

“Looking at the way things are, most of the institutions are not able to pay salaries for staff and even those who had permanent contracts were terminated and had to sign temporally ones until actual learning commences in September,” said Prof Emmanuel Kasajja, a lecturer at the University of Tourism and Business (UTB).

“Our monthly contracts were terminated and signed per hour contracts so many teachers have resorted into other businesses because they cannot depend on one or two hours pay in a week and be able to provide to the family.

“Universities failure to get committed lectures to teach hopping to be paid in the future when schools resume is the reason some universities have halted e-learning,” said Prof Kasajja.

He said e-learning programmes have been disrupted severely due to the school’s failure to pay the teachers and other staff.

Most of the students pay fees at the end of the semester. Public and private university students say that they have not been supported to continue their lessons online while in the lockdown as recommended by the Ministry of Education.

Winnie Kantengwa, a second-year student in Journalist at the University of Rwanda said they had started getting lessons from their lectures online but stopped in May.

"We do not know why our lectures stopped teaching us online yet the Ministry of Education recently recommend that they should continue supporting us online," said Kantengwa.

"It will be hard for us to study the eaten up tri-semester two and three in only three months as they say, yet it would be easy if they continue to teach online and then do further explanations when schools resume," she added.

Dr Jjuuko Margaret, an associate Professor of Journalism and Communication at the University of Rwanda, said lecturers were told to stop giving lessons online after realizing that many students were missing out due to lack interment and other electronic devices.

Prof Jjuuko, however, said though e-learning lesson stopped, students should continue to get course notes on the university e-learning platform.