It’s 4am here in Rwanda and this seems to be my wake up and think time here – so before the rest of Nyamagabe wakes up I thought I would tell you a little of what I have learned about the work the local organisation we are supporting is doing here to facilitate change for women in poverty.

I hope this fills in the gaps in understanding why I am here!

The Self Help Group initiative was started and is run by African Enterprises Rwanda, a local NFP, to help women who live in villages where extreme economic hardship and war have created a sense of isolation, aloneness and in most cases abject poverty.

Yesterday I posted up a video on my FB of the formation of three SHG’s in the village of Nyamigina, about 45 minutes from where we are staying.  AEE staff facilitated the meeting, explaining to the women what happens in a SHG and helping the men to understand what is possible for the women. Not all the men fully comprehended that they were not missing out, that the benefits would be widespread.

Some village women were too shy or ashamed to attend but hopefully, over time, more will join.

AEE Rwanda believes that by teaching a woman, it doesn’t just change her, but her family and then her village. All benefit. This is certainly true from what we have seen earlier this week while speaking with already established groups.

These women will learn to save. Each group decides at their formation how much they can save, all members will bring that much each week into their group. This 8-16c AUD$ a week will form the basis of loans they will later take out to start their business ventures.

Over the next 6-12 months, AEE will provide these groups with personal development and vocational training, attend village community meetings to ensure community support, teach business skills and provide entrepreneurship mentoring and support to each group.

The women learn to form small individual or group businesses.

They will stay in these SHG’s for life; working together, supporting and encouraging each other. They share their problems and their successes with each other.

They learn to grow their own food and care for themselves. Their hearts are no different to ours. They want to be able to look after and feed their children and themselves, send their children to school, provide for their needs, have a home, support their communities. Basic health care comes with insurance in Rwanda and for many we have spoken with, to pay for health insurance was a group goal to achieve for each of the women within the first year of starting their group.

Some women become advocates for women in their villages and some become local community leaders and development advocates across their districts. These women are now being heard. They have a voice in their communities and in their country.

The women in Self Help Groups are not being given a handout but are receiving a hand up. The Self Help Group approach is working.

It is changing not just their lives and that of their families, but whole villages are benefiting as the scale of the economy grows. It is really obvious to see.

All this week women in groups have been sharing with us stories of social, economic and human rights benefits, supportive friendships, successful businesses, improved family health, health insurance, access to child and adult education, as well as a decrease of domestic violence. They no longer suffer isolation, fear, shame, loneliness or embarrassment.

One of the things I have seen that has really excited me is the ripple effect that is happening.

Each SHG elects two women to be part of a cluster group of 20 representatives. The cluster groups are electing to support and start youth SHG’s themselves, sharing their knowledge and experience with these young people. Youths born into poverty with no knowledge of how to break that cycle.

The young people are running with this. They now have businesses and are making small incomes, supporting their parents, brothers and sisters. They now have hope. Their respect for these women was so obvious as we talked to them.

The AEE staff who have taken us around this week, introducing us to the groups they work with, are amazing. They love their country. Their hearts are for their people. They work hard to help these women make changes in their lives, staying in the town we are in and returning to their own wives and families on the weekends. They are seeing the results of their work, but there is still a long way to go.

My contribution here has been to learn and partner with them through Foxglove Project to help get as many women as possible into these groups.

Every $30 we contribute means we partner with one woman in a SHG for life. It’s crazy that $30 is all it takes.

But it’s working. And I feel blessed to have been able to see that and to bring these stories home to you.

Now it’s time to pack, have breakfast and head out of town!

Jenny
Rwanda Advocacy Team Member 2018

P.S.  It’s not too late to make a donation.  $30 is all it takes.

Why Rwanda?
It’s a reasonable question. Most people aren’t even exactly sure where to find Rwanda…somewhere in Africa. But Rwanda is a remarkable country. It’s a very small land-locked country in east Africa. It’s green and mountainous with five volcanoes. It’s home to 12 million people and the mountain gorillas ? made famous by Dian Fossey. It’s not at all what you’d imagine of a country in sub Sahara Africa.

But there is also a dark history. The 1994 Rwandan Genocide was captured in a small way in the movie, Hotel Rwanda. In this civil war, one million people died in 100 days. It’s difficult to fathom. That was my introduction to this country. I heard an interview on the radio – and then promptly turned it off. “Surely this couldn’t be happening”, was my response. But it did happen and now I find myself in the midst of a country committed to recovery. Economically. Socially. Politically.

The genocide in Rwanda became a catalyst for change rather than despair. From a strong reliance on foreign aid, at one point 85% GDP, Rwanda is rising. And it’s happening largely on the back of local industry and small enterprise. There are no natural resources to mine or waterways for trade. It’s a gradual build. Much like the Self Help Group approach for a nation.

And one of the foundations of the rebuild is women. In 2003, the Government changed the constitution to require all committees to have 30% women membership. Even the parliament. Today women account for 64% parliamentary representatives. The highest in the world. The changes allowed for poor women to get access to finance if being part of a savings and loan group. The Government implemented Gender Desks at the local council level to support women facing domestic violence or discrimination.

This acknowledgment and support of women has been repaid many times over. Women are becoming the engine room of economic growth. The poorest rural women are gathering together to start tiny businesses that impact the economy in their villages and districts. They provide for their families and become leaders in their communities.

I first heard of the Self Help Group initiative for the poorest women in rural communities when visiting Rwanda in 2010. Speaking honestly, it looked too good to be true. And you know what that means, it usually is! So, I enrolled in a Masters of Community & International Development. A three year part time course including the completion of a research dissertation. Focused on women’s Self Help Groups in Rwanda. And the results were astounding.

• 200,000 women joining a SHG for life
• 98% retention in SHGs over up to 10 years100% small business start-ups
• Social bonding irrespective of religion or cultural background
• Economic independence to provide for family needs with 12 months of joining a SHG
• Community acceptance, community leadership (one woman had become the village chief)…and the list goes on.

It was after this research that I decided to join the SHG revolution. Its outcomes and impact exceeded anything I had seen in over 15 years of international development work.

So, the answer to ‘Why Rwanda’ is multi faceted. It’s a combination of one of the poorest countries in the world, with an infamous history, making its own way out of poverty using a SHG approach focused on the capacity sitting dormant in the poorest rural women. It’s a very rare sight to see an approach working with the poorest of the poor and believing in their capacity to change their own lives and those of their family.

Now, Foxglove is increasingly looking at expanding this learning to other Developing World countries like Tanzania, DRC and Uganda. It’s also supporting similar initiatives with pavement dwellers in India. And investigating opportunities with women in Australia.

But it all started in Rwanda. A tiny country with plenty of reasons to remain in poverty but instead taking up the call to create a preferred future. Not only for the rich. Or the middle class poor. But for the poorest women in rural communities who are standing up with pride and declaring, “Never again will we make room for poverty in our lives”. And we believe them. ?❤️?

I remember my first visit to Rwanda. My flight descending through the mid-morning clouds and seeing the country for the first time. Vivid vegetal greens against deep reds of the earth made a strong impression. Those greens and reds are still the memory that comes most readily to mind. It is an accurate memory of Rwanda for the most part (aside from the dry season when a good portion of the green turns brown for a few months).

That was 2014. I was photographing for a Perth fundraising charity, Classroom of Hope, exploring a new partnership with AEE Rwanda (a Rwandan NGO). In one short week we covered much of the country. Visiting potential sites for building schools and learning about the country, its problems, and its needs. We drove a lot of rough dirt roads on our way to visit remote villages.

These dirt roads are busy routes for people walking to and from fields or school, and for bicycles carrying impossible loads (more on that another time). We drove past and met many people. I remember their clothes. It is a simplified signifier for so much of what I saw that was complex, different, and  shocking  to me. Their clothes were likely acquired many times second-hand, the colour long gone and now simply that of fabric washed in muddy water, stained with the red soil. I remember a man walking, hoe on shoulder, in shreds of a t-shirt; a few scraps of blackened fabric clinging to the shoulders and hems. I remember children and men in pants so full of holes that they resorted to wearing two or even three pairs to have adequate coverage of cloth. I remember women in faded and torn wraps and threadbare shirts. In my mind’s eye, I remember seeing this kilometre after kilometre, village after village.

This memory of Rwanda is a deep imprint of the extremes of poverty I witnessed, and the power of these scenes pushed aside numerous far less confronting memories.

However  present these scenes might be to my mind, they are not a fair picture of Rwanda’s people. Not in the way that first memory of greens and reds is a fair picture of the land.

In the years since, I have worked alongside AEE Rwanda with the Foxglove Project. I’ve lived in Rwanda for months at a time, travelled to every corner of the country, made Rwandese friends, and visited many more remote villages (some several times over the years). Happily, I now have many more varied memories to compete with that first impression. A broader and more nuanced understanding.

I now note that even with a small income, many Rwandese are sharp dressers. They have a lot to choose from. Container loads of used clothing flow into Rwanda. They are sorted by quality and auctioned to the highest bidder to be eventually sold through markets, street-side stalls, and wandering street sellers. I have often marvelled at men and women – sometimes in those self-same remote villages – dressed in business suits and polished shoes, remaining spotless while effortlessly picking their way across muddy fields and tracks. For my part, I instantly attract red dust and mud just  stepping out of the vehicle.

The traffic in cities tells me about the breadth of Rwandan life. Walking around Kigali requires crossing roads at some point. The skills of picking a gap between  velo-taxis (bicycles)  moving slowly forward while moto-taxis (motorcycles) weave in and out of traffic and roaring huffing trucks stream dust across the roadway. And there is a good share of high-end Mercedes and Prado-type vehicles. The whole spectrum, mixed together on the city streets.

In a few weeks I will return to Rwanda, back among its beautiful greens and reds. I will return to villages I have visited before to record the continuing stories of women changing their lives in self-help groups. I will visit new villages and towns, speak with women starting a journey of change, or others well down that path. These stories continue to enrich my understanding of Rwanda. Even more so, as they are being told by people associated with my first memories: dire poverty and seeming hopelessness.

It is these stories that keep me coming back. They show me that poverty in countries like Rwanda is not hopeless. That people do not need to be without hope. I don’t always remember how lucky I am to witness this part of Rwandan life and provide a channel for these stories to be told in other parts of the world.

And if my luck holds, when I fly back in to Rwanda, I will arrive during the day and see again the greens and reds through my plane window.

It’s REPORT CARD time.

We’re coming up to the end of financial year when we invite people to make a tax-deductible donation to the Foxglove Project.

But before we do that, let’s tell you what has happened in 2017/18 in the Grassroots Rwanda Project.

Grassroots Rwanda focuses on starting women’s Self Help Groups. And our goal is to start 1000 SHGs for 20,000 women in one of the poorest districts in Rwanda.

This year we have supported 2920 women into 146 new Self Help Groups.

Each woman joins for life. The women become family to one another. And they start businesses, tiny businesses, that enable them to provide for their own household.

They become independent, self-sustaining self-determining women entrepreneurs.

From poverty to freedom and with friendship at the heart of the groups.

So read our GRASSROOTS RWANDA IMPACT REPORT 2017 to discover what has happened. And then join us by making a tax-deductible donation.  It costs $30 to fund one woman into a self help group life.

Offer your resources, your influence and your heart to a project that is changing women and their communities forever.

So our Foxglove team has been on leave for a few weeks. Taken holidays and gone fishing. It’s necessary in the world of helping others that we stop to make sure we’re personally and collectively travelling well. And we’ve learned some things.

So here’s our top 3 lessons learned in 2017:

1. MEASURE IMPACT NOT ACTIVITY

It’s so easy to measure organisational achievement by numbers that measure activity: training sessions conducted, girls in school or business start ups. The discussion becomes all about efficiency. Price per head, expenses as percentage of income etc. etc. But measuring impact means looking at outcomes AND progress. From every angle. Of course, there is a need for numbers but only when applying well considered measurements. What is this number telling us? And add to that stories, feedback from family and community, and a list of achievements or even learnings from failed initiatives.  Together they form a picture of the impact we can collectively celebrate.

2. FROM LITTLE THINGS, BIG THINGS GROW

Sustainable progress takes time. Don’t over-emphasise endpoint outcomes and miss out on the milestones. Along the way there is so much beauty: a village running a community meeting about girl health and education, a family reforming after addressing long-term issues of domestic violence, a woman reading for the first time, a girl joining her mum in a family ‘business’ and even buying her first plot of land. It’s a tiny parcel, barely an Australian vegetable patch, but she’s overwhelmed at the possibilities. I don’t want to miss the small moments in chasing the big outcomes. From little things, big things grow.

3. LEARN FROM THE JOURNEY

People matter. Every person matters. The direct beneficiaries. Their communities and family members. The Foxglove team. And our donors and supporters. So, the objective is sustainable life change for everyone. When there are so many people in the Foxglove chain, we have to be prepared to slow things down. It’s not my personality but I’m learning like everyone else that I need to discover options that build for the long-term not the quick fix. And that also means working through the challenges in our personal worlds. When we recognise this for ourselves, we give others permission to ‘stop and smell the roses’. Funnily enough, this applies just as much to women in the Developing World. We are all at risk of valuing ourselves according to what we do rather than who we are.

I trust you’ve had a wonderful break. Now I’m ready to get back on the horse. Not galloping wildly. Not meandering without purpose. More of a graceful canter carrying Foxglove towards more opportunities to do good and inspire others. Who knows the lessons we will again learn along the way in 2018!

❤ Kelley

We know reading thesis documents is not for everyone. But we do know it is important that projects we support have a research base. They need to be based on more than good feelings. This may not be formal research – perhaps years of record keeping and storytelling provide the information – but where possible and significant enough, solid and reliable research should underpin initiatives that ask for thousands of dollars in funding support.

The Self Help Group approach, Foxglove’s flagship project in Rwanda, is based on such research. Before we commenced supporting this work, we completed a three-year research project tracking hundreds of women in Rwanda through individual interviews and focus groups. We were determined to answer two questions:

1. Were the SHGs bringing about the reported results?
2. If so, why was the approach working?

READ THE FOXGLOVE THESIS – AN ASSESSMENT OF EMPOWERMENT IN WOMEN’S SELF HELP GROUPS IN RURAL RWANDA

So, go along and have a read.  Perhaps the chapters recalling the women’s stories or summarising that information are enough. But let’s never underestimate taking the time to ensure that what we give to is quality development based on the empowerment of people in a sustainable context. Foxglove is intentional, responsible and transparent in how it runs as a charity and supporter of work in the Developing World.

Join us. You’ll be so glad you did!