Friday, May 29, 2009

Year Two!



Hello everyone!

My name is Sarah Woolf and I am End Poverty Now’s intern in Butare, Rwanda, working with RVCP, for summer 2009. I have been in Rwanda for a little over three weeks now, and am excited by the work that lies ahead in the next couple months.

I’d like to thank Alyx for the excellent work she did last year, and for all the help she’s given me in my transition into this job!

 

My job this year, while still working with the lovely women of the Rwandan Widows’ Association, will be quite different from the work Alyx did last year. As the past blog posts have indicated, last year involved a lot of on-the-ground work: buying materials, training the women, building houses, etc. The project has now been up and running for over a year now, and there is little for me to do in the way of manual labour—shucks! I hope to go to the beekeeping site (outside Nyakagezi village) at least once a week, usually on Saturdays when the women work there, and maybe there will be more opportunities with the upcoming harvest. My main task on this project is to develop a sound business plan. I’ve met with Jean-Claude, the Co-Ordinator of RVCP (taking over from Hovaire), and I outlined the order I would like to do things in:

  1. Collect all of RVCP’s information on the project. This will be easier said than done, as organization and accessible information are not exactly RVCP’s strong suits. I want to read up on this project, and on other beekeeping cooperatives in the area, as much as possible before I…
  2. Design an evaluation. There are two other International Participants at RVCP, one of whom has a wealth of experience in monitoring and baseline evaluations. With her help, I’ll design an evaluation of the project so far; hopefully this evaluation can be used as a template for some of the other Income Generation projects currently running at RVCP.
  3. Administer the evaluation.
  4. Business Plan. As a microfinance project, the point is for the women (RWA) to be autonomous, running a sustainable project—independent of EPN’s money—as soon as possible. It is not in the best interest of RWA, EPN or RVCP, for the project to be on EPN’s dime longer than necessary. As such, my goal is to construct a long-term business plan, researching new markets for the honey and accounting for ways in which RWA will need to reinvest their own profits in order to eventually expand their capacity (which seems to be their desire).
  5. Co-operative management training. Part of EPN’s budget stipulates an amount for training the women of RWA in “skill-building capacity such as leadership training, project management”. I will be working with Sam, project head of Income Generation (Mushuru’s successor).

 

In the meantime, I will be keeping busy helping RVCP with other projects:

  1. Management training for RVCP. One thing I am particularly interested in is organizational effectiveness and internal processes—as it stands, RVCP is very centralized, unorganized, and laden with hierarchies. Many of the International Participants (IPs), past and present, believe that much more could be done if the newer members, of which there are many, were actually allowed to do stuff. I’m currently planning a management training workshop, mostly on effective delegation, for the program heads, plus Jean-Claude and Vincent, the vice coordinator.
  2. Pyramid Project: one of the other six projects (Income Generation, Pyramid, Malaria, HIV/AIDS, Hygiene, Initiatives), this deals with the intersection between gender and HIV/AIDS. I can’t say I know that much about HIV/AIDS, but gender studies (well, feminist theory) is my “specialty”, so I really look forward to working on this—I gather it is a project that doesn’t get as much support as is required. Right now I’m working on designing/writing the English teaching manual for Sex Ed sessions taught in local secondary schools by RVCP members. This is going to be an interesting endeavour, largely because, as a Canadian and a Women’s Studies students, I have very particular ideals about ‘gender empowerment’ (a buzzword in the Kagame government). It will be a challenge to work with Rwandan values and heteronormativity; the program will also be tailored to the limited sex education received in Rwandan schools. I will hopefully also take part in these teaching sessions, but I think the British volunteer group BVDA, who will be working with RVCP here in July, will be doing a lot of this. I’m also interested to see what Pyramid might be able to do, aside from these teaching sessions.
  3. Income Generation: the bee-keeping project is the most successful of all the IG projects, and I hope that through its evaluation, more lessons can be learned to benefit the other projects; again, hopefully the evaluation can be used as a template for future assessments of IG projects,
  4. Organizational status: Both the bee-keeping project and RVCP are undergoing organizational changes. For the RWA, this means the transition into a government-recognized cooperative; for RVCP, the transition from student group to government-recognized NGO. I’m interested in both these endeavours (which seem to be kind of stalled) and might be able to help push them along.
  5. LLCCM: One of the main initiatives of RVCP is support for the LLCCM orphan center (“Let the Little Children Come to Me”). I’ve now visited twice, and am quite interested in helping there, whenever possible. Unfortunately for me, the children visit the center on Saturday mornings, when I’m at the beekeeping site. However, Lindsey, one of the IPs is working on a nutrition program, and we recently conducted interviews with some of the foster mothers; this looks promising.

 

Additionally, I’ll of course be in regular contact with EPN, writing blog posts and an article for the newsletter to keep everyone in Montreal and Canada updated on progress—more pictures to come soon! I’m very excited and happy to be here, and look forward to the coming months. Now, off to the weekly RVCP general meeting!