Network for Africa helps to rebuild lives and communities destroyed by war and genocide:
- We train people with skills that will help them get a job.
- We equip poor and vulnerable people with the skills to help themselves.
- We partner with small local African projects, producing tangible results.
- We respond to what locals tell us they need to break the cycle of poverty.
- We tackle the long-term consequences of war and genocide that remain after the emergency aid agencies have moved on.
Network for Africa has projects in Rwanda, Northern Uganda and Eastern Chad. Our aim is to benefit all people in the communities where we work, regardless of race or religion. We work with small projects, started by local people responding to local needs. We help people rebuild their lives, supporting local groups with skilled volunteers, operational advice and resources.
Rwanda
Solace Ministries
N4A has worked with Solace Ministries since 2004. Solace reaches a community of approximately 20,000 genocide survivors in 55 communities across Rwanda.
Solace is home to several N4A projects: the Learning Centre, Women Developing Rwanda, computer studies, the ReGeneration Music School, and a programme to train local leaders in how to offer psycho-social support to people in their community. N4A has also supported building work at Solace, and we sponsor school tuition for several orphans who are part of Solace’s community programmes.
The Learning Centre
Now in its third year, the Learning Centre (LC) provides free daily English literacy classes to Rwandan genocide orphans and widows. LC students are unable to attend school because they cannot afford to pay secondary school fees or because they must work to support dependants. Many of them are unemployed, and others are in low-paying, low-skilled jobs. However, they wish to learn English to improve their chances of getting work that pays better.
The LC has expanded from one teacher and one classroom to three teachers (all Rwandans), three classrooms, and 120 students. There is often a volunteer teacher from the UK, USA, Canada or Europe helping the three Rwandan teachers. The LC also has guest teachers, such as Dick Lamb, who has served as the president and vice-president for several successful companies, including the Balance Bar Company, which he founded. Mr. Lamb taught an intensive business course for two weeks and devised a full business course that is still being used at the LC.
Upon completion of the year-long course and exams, LC students are given a certificate that they can use to find employment or to apply to college.
LC students and teachers are closely involved in the development of the LC curriculum. By popular demand, the LC now covers business and economics, as well as basic life and job skills, such as writing an application and a CV/resume, and sitting an interview. Not surprisingly, there is a long waiting list for admission.
In conjunction with the LC, N4A offer donors the chance to sponsor LC students through college. Fees vary according to the college course being taken, but if you are interested in sponsoring a student please contact us.
Women Developing Rwanda
Although Women Developing Rwanda (WDR) started as a women’s discussion group (a previously unheard-of concept in Rwanda), it has become even more significant. Despite Rwanda’s famously progressive gender laws, in reality the status of women remains very low. In 2008 a group of women attending the Learning Centre founded a women’s group with the help and encouragement of N4A. They created a democratic structure and have grown to 70 members, focusing increasingly on ways to add to their skills and thus to generate income.
In July 2009 a group of 30 WDR women began an income generating business called Wanda Bread. They produce American- and English-style baked goods to sell to the large ex-patriot and NGO community in Kigali. N4A volunteers helped the Wanda Bread women learn further cooking skills so they can also get work as cooks in restaurants or bakeries in Kigali. N4A is assisting the Wanda Bread women in learning basic business skills, which will help them to develop and market their Wanda Bread commercial enterprise. N4A recently gave Wanda Bread a grant for a commercial oven, a business skills trainer and a nutritionist will be offering professional advice.
The women involved in WDR have been an inspiration to us, such is their determination to challenge the restrictive status quo in Rwandan society and to work together to overcome their problems. It is hard for those of us brought up in European or North American societies to appreciate just how many subtle and less-subtle barriers stand in the way of women elsewhere. It has been life affirming to watch the confidence of the WDR group grow.
Computer studies
N4A has supported computer classes at Solace Ministries since 2005. Volunteers from the USA kindly set up Wi-Fi throughout Solace Ministries in 2008, and IT classes continue daily in the afternoons. Thanks to Hillary Cannon, Dick Lamb, and Liberty Wines, several shipments of second-hand computers have gone to Rwanda. Whenever volunteers visit Rwanda, we ask them to carry out second-hand equipment. Please let us know if you or a friend could carry a laptop for us, or if you have a spare laptop we could take.
ReGeneration Music Centre
Psychologists recognise that music can have a remarkable therapeutic, healing effect for traumatised people. With N4A’s help, two remarkable UK music teachers, Amy Stead and David Wald, have volunteered a year of their time to set up the ReGeneration Music Centre in Kigali.
Amy and David teach the LC students singing, composition and how to play instruments. In addition they have created various choirs and music groups with other Solace beneficiaries who do not attend the LC. The ReGeneration Music Centre offers students the chance to learn a new skill and a place to interact and have fun. Skills gained from the music lessons also provide a potential source of employment: in Rwanda, bands and singers are often hired for weddings and other social events.
Surprisingly, Rwanda has never before had a school entirely focused on music education, despite the importance of music, particularly singing, in Rwandan culture. Consequently, some wealthy students are prepared to pay for private lessons in the evenings.
There is keen interest in the music centre from other local groups searching for ways to provide therapy to people for whom it is hard to talk about their experiences. We salute Amy and David for their dedication, enthusiasm and professionalism. They have started something quite unique.
Aspire
Aspire was started by a remarkable Rwandan woman, Peace Ruzage. She began a year-long training programme poor and vulnerable women, teaching them literacy, business skills, women’s rights, nutrition and income-generating skills at her home in Kigali. As a result, her ‘graduates’ have set up small businesses. Their aim is to become economically independent and to be able to feed and send their children to school, breaking the cycle of poverty.
Peace began the initiative in 2007 when she became annoyed by women fighting in the alley outside her window. Many of the women were survivors of sexual abuse, genocide survivors or sex workers. Peace told the women that they needed to get a skill and provide for their children rather than fighting, and she invited them onto her veranda to settle their differences peacefully. Within a few weeks, she had 300 women turning up regularly. She has since formalised the programme and now works with 100 women at a time, drawn from all ethnic communities, forming small businesses together, making money and providing support to each other. This is genuine reconciliation in action.
Aspire makes an enormous difference to the women involved, as well as to their families and the wider community. Peace would like to take in another 100 women each year. However, Aspire has virtually no resources. If you would like to help us support Aspire, or if you know of an outlet that might sell their jewellery, please contact us.
Ntarama Centre
N4A has worked with the Rwandan group SURF, which also has a branch in the UK, since 2004. Together we have built dozens of simple homes for orphans who otherwise had no secure or permanent form of accommodation. We are now completing a community centre, a clinic and a maternity hospital for an extremely deprived rural area of Rwanda called Ntarama, 45 minutes south of Kigali. The clinic and maternity ward will provide healthcare for 17,000 local people who otherwise have to walk for hours to reach the nearest medical centre. It is hoped that after three years of operation, the Rwandan government will assume the majority of the running costs. In the meantime, we are keen to find support to help pay for medical tests and x-rays, as well as the salary of doctors and nurses. Please let us know if Ntarama interests you and we will be happy to provide more information.
Maternal health care
In Rwanda, one in every sixteen women will die in pregnancy - compared to one in every 40,000 in Ireland, for instance.
Pregnancy ends in disaster for the simplest of reasons: mothers bleed to death. For a few pennies, a birth attendant could inject oxytocin to stop the bleeding. However, there are too few midwives or pharmaceuticals, and many women cannot afford medical fees or transportation to the nearest birth attendant.
Death in childbirth is a disaster for the whole family because the woman’s surviving children have much poorer chances of thriving without her. Yet, if a young woman gets a good start at motherhood, her baby will benefit, and so will her other offspring.
When N4A asked local widows and orphans in Ntarama what they needed most, they were enthusiastic about having a clinic and maternity ward. As one young man remarked, “What is the point of providing us with a school first if half the children die in infancy and the rest are unproductive because of malaria?”
On a recent trip to Ntarama, we saw an acquaintance, a woman who runs the local genocide memorial centre. She does not know we are connected to the nearby clinic and maternity ward we have just completed, so we were interested when she started talking about “our new hospital.”
She said, “You realise what this means? There’s a good chance my daughters won’t die in childbirth.”
We would be grateful for support to help us pay for medical tests, pharmaceuticals and birth attendant supplies, and for the salary and training of our midwives.
Coeur Joyeux
Although N4A does not provide funding for this Kigali-based orphanage, we have supplied volunteers to Coeur Joyeux (CJ) to teach their beneficiaries English, family planning and health education. We also sent a business graduate to work with CJ for three months, to help with a budget and management plan and budget for CJ’s future development. In addition, we have provided resources, such as computers and agricultural supplies.
Northern Uganda
Counselling Training
Patongo is a much-neglected corner of the land inhabited by the Acholi people, who have been brutally targeted by both the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan government for twenty bloody years. Thousands have been killed or abducted, and people have been forced to abandon their farms to live in dismal circumstances in camps. The war stopped only very recently, and while many international charities are active elsewhere in Acholiland, they have avoided Patongo because it does not have an infrastructure making it attractive to foreign aid workers. It has also only recently been safe to work there.
N4A has replicated its successful Rwandan counselling training programme in Patongo, working with the few local and international groups that are there. Our American team of psychologists visits twice yearly to run training for community leaders, and in schools and prisons.
Income generation
The N4A team is working with the long-suffering and overworked Acholi women to develop income-generating activities. Much like the women in Aspire in Rwanda (see above), these women are survivors of domestic abuse, substance abuse, forced prostitution, HIV/AIDS, severe poverty, illiteracy and the legacy of the vicious civil war.
In November 2008, fifty-five local women formed an income generating association, and our staff trained them in how to start and run a successful small business, including basic bookkeeping skills. In November, N4A allocated the association a 500,000 shilling loan to be paid back with interest. Many of the women also utilised our business training by starting individual income generating projects. They are making healthy profits and intend to use them to educate their children.
The women also presented N4A with a business proposal, asking for a donation for 20 oxen, 10 ploughs and 55 bikes – a project for which the generous staff at Liberty Wine is raising money.
We also gave extensive family planning and HIV/AIDS mitigation and sensitisation sessions to the women’s group, carers of children with HIV, prisoners, senior school students, and men and women in the local community.
We have been joined in Patongo by our sister charity, Jubilee Action, who are now supporting the Amazing Youth Centre project of our local partners David and Agnes Lagen, community organisers in Patongo.
Chad
Counselling training
N4A has partnered with international charity CORD in order to replicate our lay counsellor training programme in the Darfuri refugee camps in Chad. We took our second team of psychologists to the Gaga and Farchana refugee camps in March 2009. We gave the first basic phases of counselling skills training to more than 100 men and women, most of whom were teachers or work with children. We also trained staff from the NGO ACT, who work as counsellors in the camps full-time, in more advanced and complex counselling techniques.
Joining the N4A team was Mariam Suliman, a distinguished female Darfuri doctor, who now lives in exile in London. She ran sessions on sexual and gender-based violence and female empowerment for women in the camps.
N4A plans to return twice yearly, although an increasingly unstable security situation is making all future planning difficult.
N4A Blog
Latest News
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April 2010 Newsletter Network for Africa has already had a busy and productive new year working with inspirational men, women and children in Rwanda, Chad and northern Uganda who are rebuilding their lives in the wake of conflict...Read More...
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