Rwanda Basic Education Board Digital & AI Literacy Certification — Microsoft Innovative Educator Badges for 50,000+ Teachers

The Rwanda Basic Education Board (REB) runs a nationwide, blended in-person-plus-online digital-literacy certification programme for pre-primary, primary and lower-secondary teachers, financed under the World Bank-supported 'Rwanda Quality Basic Education for Human Capital Development' project.

The programme aims to certify teachers nationally in digital literacy and, in its most recent cycles, emerging technologies including AI, robotics and virtual reality, so teachers can use AI-supported tools to prepare lesson plans and assessments alongside REB eLearning platform navigation and Microsoft 365 applications.

In its most recent cycle (22 December 2025 - 22 February 2026), REB certified 7,500 teachers -- 30% pre-primary, 50% primary and 20% lower-secondary. On successful completion, every trained teacher receives the internationally recognised Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) certification, and a parallel Rwanda TVET Board track has certified a further 2,500 TVET teachers under the same digital-literacy credential.

The latest cycle brought the cumulative total of teachers certified across all rollout phases to 50,539, giving the programme strong evidence of scale and institutionalisation across Rwanda's basic-education system.

What the programme lacks so far is independent measurement of downstream effects: published reporting covers completion and certification counts, not classroom-practice change or student learning outcomes, and there is no detail on data-protection or AI-ethics content within the curriculum.