The Contribution of Internship Programme in Increasing Employability Opportunities for Youth Graduates with Disabilities in Rwanda - A Case Study Connect Project for Uwezo Youth Empowerment

Despite the efforts of disability organizations, advocates, and government legislations aimed at providing persons with disabilities equality in all aspects of society, Rwandan youth with disabilities continue to face issues of poverty and unemployment at rates substantially higher than those for non-disabled Rwandans. Approximately 5 % of 10 million inhabitants are persons with disabilities NISR 2012. In Rwanda, the majority of youth graduates with disabilities are not employed by any institution yet they are qualified for the job. Some of the reasons that have been a limiting factor for their employment include lacking work experiences, discrimination of employers, inaccessible job information and recruitment process and others. General and specific objectives as it is focusing on the contribution of paid internship programme in increasing employability opportunities for youth graduates with disabilities in Rwanda. Research design is a blueprint for conducting a study with maximum control over factors that may interfere with the validity of the findings. This study was adopted descriptive research design. The target population for the study consists 92 youth graduates obtained internship through UWEZO connect project. This study was used questionnaire technique as data collection instrument. The internship programme explains employability opportunities for youth graduates with disabilities in Rwanda, especial in UWEZO connect project in Rwanda. Increasing internship programme has an overall correlation with employability opportunities for youth graduates with disabilities of 0.733 which is strong and positive. This means that approximately 73.3 % variations of independent Variable are explained the dependent variable at 5 % level of significance. These indicate good fit of the regression equation used. The overall significance of the regression estimation model, It indicates that the model is significant in explaining the relationship between Internship programme and increasing employability opportunities for youth graduates with disabilities at 5 % level of significance. Analysis of Variance shows that f-calculated is greater that f critical that is 6.321greater than0.00. Paid internship programmes is the most significant in explaining the employability opportunities for youth graduates with disabilities with a significance of 0.000 which is less that a p-value of 0.05 and beta value is 0.884. Based on the information drawn from the table above the researcher concluded that the effect of the variables paid internship; unpaid internship and cooperative internship is phenomenal in favor for increasing employment in youth graduate with disability in Rwanda. The effect of paid internship programme on increasing employability opportunities for youth graduates with disabilities in Rwanda was appreciated with the majority of respondents. After analyzing and interpretation of the data, the researcher came up with the following recommendations: The evidences form the results indicated that paid internship programme has a high positive correlation to the increasing employability opportunities for youth graduates with disabilities in Rwanda. In this regard Researcher recommends to the UWEZO project that, to continue providing some money for the interns because, its helping them to work hard.