Staff Retention in Public Universities in Rwanda: Diagnostics and Strategies of Intervention

Abstract

The increase in turnover in Rwandan Universities remains an inescapable phenomenon that the authorities have now to put up with. After the presentation of some of the factors likely to explain this phenomenon, the study reported in this article proposes a diagnostic and systemic approach allowing to analyze a problematic situation of non-loyalty of the staff in the Universities and Institutions of Higher Learning.

The survey questionnaire has been administered to lecturers and administrative staff. 104 exploitable questionnaire have been analyzed and completed through face to face interviews. The analysis of the results confirm some of the elements from literature; they show that determining factors with an incidence on staff turnover are working conditions and their perception of what their profession is. Age and academic rank play an important role as well in this study in opposition to other individual characteristics which do not explain the reasons for such turnover.

This article thus examines various political options capable of minimizing the negative effects of the departures of the staff. The principal hypothesis consists in saying that the most adequate strategy to face the problem of retention of the staff is that which rests on a rigorous follow-up in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the measures set up particularly by comparing the costs of the strategies of retention with those which are generated by the turnover.

These tracks of intervention allow to note that the public Institutions are far from being stripped vis-a-vis the non-loyalty of their staff, as they hardly try to identify the causes. The conclusion relates to the stakes concerning the retention including that of the improvement of the quality of life of the staff.

Key words: retention, factors of attraction, staff mobility, psychological contract, turnover.