A new edition of the Summer School after last year’s success

After the great success of the Summer School entitled “Landslides and slope stability analysis in Rwanda“ held at RP-IPRC Musanze in July 2022 and organized by the EnRHEd team together with the Rwandan HEI itself in cooperation with Rwanda Water Resources Board, this year the EnRHEd team wanted to organize a second edition of the Summer School.

This year the Summer School is entitled “Use of software in the service of land protection against landslides and flooding” and is divided into 2 parts: part 1 (first 2 days) are dedicated to the topic of landslides with a training on basic slope stability analysis with HYRCAN, part 2 (following 3 days) are dedicated to the topic of river flood modeling with a specific training on basic one-dimensional hydraulic modeling with HEC-RAS.

Indeed, at the moment, in the Civil Engineering programs of Rwandan universities there are no university courses dealing with the use of adequate software on the topic of slope and flood stability, despite the growing need for a basic knowledge of civil engineering and hydrogeological methods to analyze the stability of slopes and floods to ensure the protection of life, property, the natural environment and human activity.

So, the main goals of the Summer School for the Year 2023 are the following:

1. training teaching staff and professionals in the field of civil engineering about methods for dealing with land protection problems such as landslides and floods; 
2. increasing the knowledge of Civil Engineers and technicians about the approaches, data and possible solutions to protect the territory against natural hazards; 
3. bringing up the capability of tackling and solving both slope stability and flood problems through the use of specific software. 

The Summer School is hosted at Rwanda Polytechnic – College of Musanze, and last 1 week (5 working days): it include both theoretical lessons by Italian professors and practical exercises, through the use of appropriate free numerical codes (HYRCAN for landslides; HEC-RAS for river flood modelling).  End-users of the Summer School are about 30 participants as teaching staff, civil engineers, technicians, who are responsible of higher education courses related to territory management and land protection.

The Summer School programme is shown below:

The Summer School is supported by the Erasmus+ EnRHEd Project and Rwanda Polytechnic – College of Musanze, in cooperation with Rwanda Water Resources Board.