Prof. Geoffrey RUGEGE, Vice Chair & Deputy Legal Representative

Professor Rugege currently serves as Chancellor of the African Leadership University Rwanda, Chancellor of the Kigali Institute of Management, on the Board of Governors of the University Rwanda, on the Advisory Council (board) of Riviera High School, and as a member of the Rwanda Academy of Language and Culture. He is a consultant in areas of Higher Education within the East, Central and Southern Africa (ECASA) consulting group.

Geoffrey Rugege, born in Uganda, is a retired professor of linguistics having taught linguistics in the University of Louisiana System (Grambling State University) and in the University of North System (Fayetteville State University) in the United States for 28 years. He served as Executive Director of the National Council for Higher Education Higher Education Council in Rwanda aka Higher Education Council (HEC).

He obtained a Bachelor's degree from Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, his M.A. and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He served as General Manager of Uganda Publishing House, ltd (1968-1974. In 1996 he migrated to find asylum in the United States. During his professional career in the United States, he worked as production assistant at Viking Press in New York, and as head of Department of English and professor at Grambling State University in Louisiana.

He has edited and published three books: two anthologies of African American Literature: The Black Orpheus published by Simon & Schuster (1996) and Introduction to Literature: Drama, Poetry and Prose by Thomson Publishers (2002) and a Kinyarwanda-English Dictionary (2010 Fountain Publishers, Kampala). His linguistic work has been in the area of lexicography in which he has participated in the Kamusi Project, started at Yale University. The Kamusi Project is an online interactive dictionary of various African Languages, including Swahili and Kinyarwanda and several other African languages.

In 2004, he obtained a two-year research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH, USA) to develop a three-language online dictionary: Kinyarwanda Swahili-Dictionary to facilitate the Kamusi Project, which continues even today after the after the grant the grant period expired. This grant involved collaboration between Grambling State University, Yale University, University of Illinois and the Institute of Research in Science and Technology (IRST) in Rwanda.

Professor Rugege continues to be passionate about education. He is currently engaged in short-term training in soft-skills development (see his website www.esprwanda.com) and is also engaged in developing an online platform for teaching of Kinyarwanda to the Rwandan Diaspora using the Duo Lingo model.

He is married to Anne Rugege, his wife of 44 years, has four daughters and nine grand children.