Late last month, life in Rwanda was returning to its new form of normal. People were returning to working life and domestic travel, although still impacted by the COVID pandemic. A news article on 29^th September 2020 noted that,

“Today, with large parts of the economy open again, more than 10,000 field workers visit homes, villages and towns to conduct contact tracing, submitting daily reports to the government. Coronavirus-prevention guidelines are blared through loudspeakers fitted on drones that hover above congested suburbs in the capital, Kigali.”

(The Wall Street Journal; https://www.wsj.com/articles/rwandas-aggressive-approach-to-covid-wins-plauditsand-warnings-11601372482)

Grassroots Rwanda is also returning to life. October saw the recommencement of the women’s Self Help Groups. Not only will we come to a better understanding of how Foxglove women and groups have coped with the COVID pandemic but we will be starting up new clusters in new villages.

During the last quarter of 2020, the Foxglove Grassroots Rwanda project aims to start 10 Self Help Groups for 200 women in 10 villages of between 2000 to 4000 people. The women are identified by the community leaders as the poorest women in the village with a local woman asked to take on the role of the coordinator. She personally invites the women to the community meetings, facilitates the formation of the groups, organises the training (personal and skills training), and supports the groups to meet weekly under a rotational leadership model. Every woman leads and takes up group roles across the year. Within six months the women are ready to commence micro-businesses using the weekly savings the women contribute to a savings pot. Such a remarkable approach!

To date, Foxglove’s Grassroots Rwanda has supported more than 16,000 women to join groups. Our Self-Help Goal goal of 200 groups for 4000 women in 10 new villages is a financial target of $60,000.

I know it is another crazy idea.

In fact, my dream would be 2000 people giving $30 per person. But absolutely no pressure. Foxglove supporters are about far more than funds. We are about dreams and hopes and passion. And we love to think that you want to join us!

With the rise of technology, social media and globalisation have arrived stories of poverty and international crises bringing us ever closer to the plight and struggle of others. Particularly those in the Developing World. And we have responded with generosity and concern. 

In the early days of discussing ways to help the ‘poor’ came a focus on children. A stirring belief that supporting children was an investment into a country’s future that would be rewarded with better leadership. More representative of the poor. And more able to lead their country into prosperity and independence. 

But now three decades later, few of the underpinning promises have been realised.  

Instead, the growth in higher education, particularly graduate education, has led to a new kind of disappointment in the Developing World. A disappointment among the youth that so much effort and expectation is not resulting in professional appointments or political influence in countries without the growth and capacity to hire its graduating cohorts or the will to share power. 

Donors are discovering that the cost of funding such endeavours continues to rise and rise until more and more sponsors are needed for each child to fund the direct costs and the infrastructure. 

There is a disempowerment among parent generations with the disconnect being created in rural and urban poor communities with children investing in short term opportunities that are taking them away from their families and culture. There’s a realisation among mothers that such opportunities have impacted on a fundamental human wiring. An instinct in a woman to provide for her children. A desire to secure their future by providing a family’s basic needs: good nutrition, healthcare, shelter and education. 

I was reminded of the power of this desire to provide for our own when visiting women in Rwanda. The women were members of Self Help Groups starting up small businesses now generating income allowing them to become independent and self-determining. I asked the question, “What do you dream for your children?” 

The answers reminded me that they were mothers first. That just like me, they carried dreams for their sons and daughters. And they too felt enormous pride when helping these dreams to come true.  

Josephine tells me, “Now I have my business, my children come to me. They come for advice and support. And I can help. I pay for their schoolbooks, uniform and school fees. They see me differently. I am part of their future.” 

And in that one question asked over and over again, I was reminded why the focus needs to start with women. Women carry the hopes of their families and communities. They will invest all that they have into their children and others.  

The emphasis of foreign support cannot remain on providing physical infrastructure and foreign–funded services. It needs to be on the empowerment of women and communities who carry the dreams day by day.  

For with dreams comes responsibility as well as opportunity, and these women are waiting to grab both with two hands. 

The COVID-19 crisis is creating uncertainty for everyone, but the effects are potentially devastating for the women we support in the Developing World. ?

In response, we have set up a special COVID-19 Rwanda Appeal to support the women and their families from the Self Help Groups through this crisis.

Every AUD$30 donation will help a woman come through this period with their homes and micro businesses intact. This is a one-off tax-deductible gift.

We are starting with a goal to support 1000 women in Nyamagabe. With an average of 5 family members that’s a total of 5000 people supported through this crisis and indirectly another 20,000 community members. ?

These women are living in remote, but densely populated rural communities with limited access to healthcare and public health information. The network of Self Help Groups is ideal for quickly disseminating health, hygiene and safe family practice training to the women.

In addition, financial and material assistance will be provided to women whose income-generating opportunities have been terribly affected.

If you are in a position to help financially – thank you. If not we understand and simply encourage you to share our campaign instead. Together we can help the most vulnerable women survive this crisis. ??

“The difference between a broken community and a thriving one is the presence of woman who are valued.”  – Michelle Obama 

For decades, charity in the Developing World has centred on Western generosity funding infrastructure and poverty alleviation. It’s easy to see the needs in our world:  clean water, food security, access to sanitation and education…but for all our aid and welfare support, the returns have been far ‘poorer’ than expected. Not only has the gap increased between the rich and the poor, but the poor have become poorer. 

And now, in the 21st Century, we wonder what we can do differently? How can we champion and contribute to those living in poverty in ways that are sustainable, respectful (of people and culture) and empowering? 

My first lesson was understanding the many faces of poverty. Economic and physical indicators are far easier to see, photograph and measure. We talk about numbers of children immunised, operations performed, wells built, small business started, children in school and growth in dollars earned per day.

But in many ways, they are the face of poverty but not its heart.

And addressing and celebrating changes in these numbers reassure us that we are making a difference – yet they also act to sedate us to other more sinister indicators of poverty: self-worth, self-determination, social isolation, political exclusion, and domestic violence. 

If we offer schooling, even higher education, but don’t provide entrepreneurial and personal development training, then most graduates will leave unemployed and disillusioned. If women start and build small businesses but remain outsiders in family and community decision making, then they gain responsibility without power. If we provide community training and infrastructure without connecting the poor to others, then they remain alone. The harshest of conditions.

It is not the needs that are difficult to identify but the method. The process. The approach. We have learned of the need for consultation and delegated decision making, for indigenous organisations to lead the community engagement and development of strategy, and for starting with an objective of sustainable development. An impact or outcome that lasts well after activity stops. 

But Foxglove believes in another important element. That addressing poverty means engaging the women of a community. In much of the Developing World, women are secondary citizens. Marginalised and excluded. But something wonderful happens when women make their way to the centre. They become connectors, share resources and knowledge, call for change that benefits others and address issues of children and human rights.

I was reminded of this on a recent visit to Rwanda when meeting with a woman who in the last nine months has helped form and now leads a Federation overseeing 2500 of the district’s poorest women in Self Help Groups. The Self Help Groups (SHGs) connect 20 women together for life. They gain a social cohesion and belonging that changes their place in the community. They start small businesses that enable them to support their own families with basic and higher-level needs. They join village committees as leaders and decision-makers. They take up a role as empowered and contributing members of their community and they could be forgiven for seeing the Federation as a way to advance their own needs and position. But when I ask Virginie about the current goal of the Federation, her response could not be more different, 

 “We have a goal to change the way children are treated in our community. Before we joined the SHG and took part in trainings, we didn’t know that we were mistreating our children.  Sometimes we were hurting them and other times we were neglecting them. Now we understand. Now we plan to find ways to educate our community and our schools about the rights and care of children. We will not stop until this is done.” 

I thought of my meeting with Virginie when reading this quote from Michelle Obama,
“The difference between a broken community and a thriving one is the presence of woman who are valued.”  

On this International Day of Charity, let us acknowledge that the act of doing good can be based on more than good intentions and visual outcomes. It has the ability to bring out the capacity in people that they might live fulfilled empowered lives, both serving and changing their communities.  

Kelley Chisholm

To read more about how Foxglove is engaging the poorest women through the Self Help Group approach, please visit our Grassroots Rwanda page.

“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.”
― Socrates

At Foxglove, we are keen to make the distinction between education and learning; between knowledge and thinking. In the Western context, there is often great reward for education and knowledge. We can gain credibility, credentials and kudos derived from formal education. And in turn, leading to employment or the ability to generate income.

But in the Developing World, post-literacy education produces far less opportunities or reward. For every position, there are innumerable potential applicants and for the most part, such jobs are never advertised or offered.

Instead, those starting in poverty need to discover their own capacity and brilliance: to think, weigh up, decide and act. Capacities they have never had the knowledge or skills to consider. This sits at the heart of a ‘poverty mindset’; the lack of confidence in one’s own abilities to create a different future.

But this also sits at the heart of Foxglove. We partner with indigenous organisations who see the capacity in others and have the passion to bring it out with the kind of training and sharing of knowledge that challenges old mindsets and inspires new ways of thinking.

Through funding self-help groups, we are enabling women to receive training in goal setting and entrepreneurship, money and loans, decision making and conflict resolution, marketing and bookkeeping. And just when you think you’ve seen it all, they attend a workshop on innovation. Not for the large business owner but for the small single person business entrepreneur.

You see every piece of training, every input or discussion, equips each woman to discover a new way of thinking. An opening up to possibilities and opportunities until she can barely believe where she has come from.

I remember one young woman telling me, “Never again will we make room for poverty in our lives”. And as I heard those words, I heard a different mindset talking. One that said, “Don’t worry about us, we are well on our way.” And I believe her!

Visit our Grassroots Rwanda page to learn more about the self-help group approach.

♥️

Kelley

Do you ever wonder about the generation gap experienced in the West? The all too often separation of the young from the old?

I hear of seniors feeling ‘invisible’ and parents feeling impotent.

But we are working on it. We recognise for the most part that all members of a community, men and women, old and young, locally born, immigrants and refugees, all come together to form a tapestry of community with colour and diversity and strength.

So, recently in Rwanda when visiting youth Self Help Groups, I was surprised to find that the women of the SHGs had come up with a plan, a strategy, to help the youth of their own communities. And rather than being rejected or causing angst, it had built connection and relationship.

The coming together of the old and the young has never looked so good.

For every 10 Self Help Groups (SHGs) in a village, is formed a Village Cluster Association. It’s a committee made up of two representatives from each Group. But as they regularly remind me, their ‘mandate’ is to focus beyond themselves. It is a mandate to develop and support the community. The whole village.

With this in mind, we visited a Village Cluster to better understand their thinking and initiatives. And one idea stood out. A number of the Village Clusters had established youth SHGs. The women had observed the poverty and hopelessness among homeless and uneducated youth and decided that if the SHGs had worked for them, then they could work for the youth.

So with this sunny optimism and simplicity, the women started inviting youth living on the streets to a youth community meeting. They held an introduction event. Much as it happened for them. They set up 3 or 4 SHGs in each village. The women from the SHGs became the trainers, the cheerleaders, the advisers and the support. Whatever they had learned, they passed along. There was no financial incentive. Not even financial support. Instead a willingness of these women to invest time and effort into the next generation with a firm belief that this was their mandate.

And its bearing unbelievable fruit.

I headed along to a meeting bringing together two youth SHGs. 40 young people. We started with singing and dance, an introduction from a senior youth with an invitation to ask any questions we liked. They told stories of transformed lives. Young men setting up barber shops and trading cows, pigs and small animals at local animal markets. Young women with tailoring and small agriculture businesses, and petit trade shops.

In just a year each SHG member was saving a minimum of 1000Rwf a week and taking out loans up to 100,00Rwf (US$110) – both financial achievements unheard of amongst the women who had started the youth SHGs.

One young man spoke of being angry and dangerous in his community. He tells me, “Now, I am gentle and kind. I couldn’t hurt a flea.”

I wondered how this extraordinary growth had impacted on those original relationships. Between the women and the youth.

I need not have worried.

At the end of our catch up, when opening the floor to final comments, one young woman stands to her feet. She tells me that she wants to say thank you. Thank you to those women who came to her and invited her to the SHG. Thank you for the time and opportunity that has changed her life. And without hesitation, the young people encourage the older women sitting on the edges into the centre of the room. They begin to sing and dance. Again. To celebrate the gifts of knowledge, community and hope.

There’s barely a dry eye among this group of visitors. This is cross-generational support at its best. And something that needs to be protected, modelled and reproduced across the world. It’s a picture of giving back, lifting up and walking together. It’s a picture of the kind of community we all want to share in. And here we are, finding it in Rwanda.