Least Developed Countries account for less than 1 percent of world trade. Credit: Ali Mkumbwa/Unsplash

By Deodat Maharaj
GEBZE, Türkiye, Aug 22 2025 (IPS)

Artificial intelligence and the use of frontier technologies are already transforming trade and boosting prosperity, particularly for developed and some developing countries. This ranges from the digital exchange of documents, the digitalisation of trade processes and leveraging online platforms to fast-track cross-border trade.

The rapid adoption of new technologies will further consolidate the dominance of world trade by developed economies, which currently account for roughly 74 percent of global trade, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The world’s 44 Least Developed Countries (LDCs), with a population of an estimated 1.4 billion people, are seeing a different trajectory altogether. According to the World Trade Organisation, they account for less than 1 percent of the world’s merchandise trade. LDCs continue to reel from the relentless onslaught of bad news, including increased protectionist barriers.

Deodat Maharaj, Managing Director of the United Nations Technology Bank for the Least Developed Countries.

UNCTAD has estimated that tariffs on LDCs will have a devastating consequence, possibly leading to an estimated 54 percent reduction in the exports from the world’s poorest countries.

In this dire situation, exacerbated by declining overseas development assistance, what does an LDC do to survive in this difficult trade environment?

To start with, they must continue to advocate globally for fairer terms of trade. At the same time, they need to be more aggressive in addressing matters for which they have control. Otherwise, the status quo will leave their people in a perpetually disadvantageous situation. Imagine paying three times more than your competitors just to ship a single crate of goods across a border. For millions of entrepreneurs in the world’s LDCs, it is the everyday cost of doing business. Technology offers a way out in reducing these high costs.

Indeed, when the international community gathered in Sevilla for the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in July 2025, one truth stood out: Technology is no longer a luxury—it is a prerequisite for effective participation in global trade. The outcome document was clear that for the world’s 44 LDCs, bridging infrastructure gaps, building domestic technological capacity, and leveraging science, technology, and innovation are vital to unlocking trade opportunities.

So, given the challenges and opportunities, what forms the core elements of an action agenda for LDCs to leverage trade to generate jobs and opportunities for their people?

Firstly, there is a need to pivot to digital solutions, which can dramatically reduce trade costs and open new markets. According to the World Bank, paperless customs and single-window systems have been proven to cut clearance times by up to 50 percent, reducing bureaucracy that stifles commerce. In Benin, automating port procedures reduced processing time from 18 days to just three days (World Bank). E-commerce platforms, when paired with secure payment systems and targeted training, have shown remarkable potential.

Secondly, invest in digital infrastructure. The data suggest that LDCs still have a lot of catching up to do. The solution is for development partners and the international financial institutions to steer more resources in this area with a fixed percentage of resources, say, 15 percent of a country’s portfolio dedicated to boosting digital infrastructure.

Thirdly, focus on value addition and reduce transition away from the export of raw commodities. This in turn requires the human resource capacity to spur innovation and creativity. Boosting investment in research and development can pay rich dividends.

According to the World Economic Forum, LDCs invest less than 1 percent of GDP in research and development compared to developed countries. The Republic of Korea invests 4%.

Finally, for LDCs to enter the technological age, their businesses must lead the way. It is difficult to do so in some countries like Burundi, where internet penetration is a mere 5 percent of the population. The average internet penetration is around 38 percent. So, in addition to digital infrastructure, support must be provided to micro-, small and medium-scale enterprises to benefit from the opportunities provided by technology to boost trade, thereby creating jobs and opportunities. This includes the establishment of incubators to support this business sector, boosting their technological capacities to trade and profile their businesses on digital platforms, and helping them to deliver services created by the digital economy. Rwanda has been a pioneer in this regard.

Of course, technology alone will not address all the challenges faced by LDCs. However, by delivering cost-efficient solutions, it can help level the playing field and drive transformation. It is time for the international community and development partners to back their words with action in helping LDCs advance this agenda. Since LDCs represent an emerging market of 1.4 billion people, when they rise, everyone else will rise with them.

Deodat Maharaj, a national of Trinidad and Tobago is the Managing Director of the United Nations Technology Bank for the Least Developed Countries and can be reached at: deodat.maharaj@un.org

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Abortion is illegal in Uganda. Girls who get pregnant resort to deadly backstreet abortion providers. However, it is also criminal to provide safe abortion services. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
KAMPALA, Aug 18 2025 (IPS)

Sarah Namukisa nearly missed her final year exams earlier this year. She was subjected to a mandatory pregnancy test—the 25-year-old student at the Medical Laboratory Training School in Jinja was then expelled because she was pregnant.

While Namukisa’s case sparked public criticism, activists say it was by no means an isolated incident.

Across Uganda and other East African countries, pregnant students continue to face expulsion, forced school dropout, and stigma in both public and private educational institutions.

Labila Sumaya Musoke, from the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER), told IPS that the widespread practice reflects deep-seated systemic discrimination and patriarchal control over young women’s bodies and futures

She said the expulsion mirrors systemic and institutional discrimination that international and regional human rights bodies have explicitly deemed unlawful and incompatible with human rights standards.

Namukisa was lucky that her case attracted the attention of the civil society and Uganda’s Equal Opportunities Commission. The commission ordered her school to rescind the expulsion. Many young women resort to deadly “backstreet” abortions in an effort to find ways to return to school or higher learning institutes. Abortion is still outlawed in Uganda and its neighbors—Kenya and Tanzania.

The most recent Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) datasets of the 12 East African countries found that the overall prevalence of adolescent pregnancy in East Africa was 54.6 percent. The survey concluded that it is vital to design public health interventions targeting higher-risk adolescent girls, particularly those from the poorest households, by enhancing maternal education and empowerment to reduce adolescent pregnancy and its complications.

Teenage pregnancy and motherhood rate in Kenya stands at 18 percent. This implies that about one in every five teenage girls between the ages of 15-19 years has either had a live birth or is pregnant with their first child.

The rate of teenage pregnancy has stagnated for over a decade in Uganda; it stood at 25 percent in 2006, at 24 percent in 2011 and now shows trends of rising at 25 percent. Teenage pregnancy in Tanzania is a significant public health issue, with 22 percent of women aged 15-19 having been pregnant, according to a 2022 Tanzania Demographic and Health Survey.

Rosemary Kirui, the Legal Advisor at the Center for Reproductive Rights—which works in seven countries, including Uganda—said the enjoyment of the Sexual Reproductive Health rights has been limited by barriers related to the legal and policy framework.

“We have a legal environment that has restrictive laws that criminalize some SHRH services. Most of the laws were adopted or inherited from the colonialists. And most of the countries have not changed the laws. So you will find that the penal code is similar, giving a blanket criminalization of abortion. So you will find this is being interpreted narrowly in many African countries,” said Kirui.

She told IPS that the other aspect of restrictive laws is the age of consent, where there is a mandatory third-party requirement for adolescents seeking information and sexual reproduction health services.

Primer Kwagala, a Ugandan Lawyer whose organization, Women Pro Bono Initiative (WPI), has been litigating for access to SHR services, told IPS that the country maintains restrictions on abortion.

“We are saying that 16 women are dying each day due to lack of services in public health facilities. And there are those who are dying in communities due to unsafe abortion. We have on our law books outdated colonial policies preventing health workers from providing life-saving services.”

Uganda’s constitution says that no one can take the life of an unborn child except in exceptional circumstances.

“For many women to exercise autonomy over their bodies and to say, ‘I cannot carry this pregnancy; I need an abortion,’ they cannot go ahead and have that discussion. The first thing the health worker will say is, ‘I don’t want to go to prison,’” said Kwagala.

The Ministry of Health in Uganda has issued guidelines allowing safe abortions in cases of defilement, rape, and incest. But the guidelines, according to Kwagala, are more on paper than in practice.

In 2020, a ruling by the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC) against the Republic of Tanzania found that Tanzania’s policy of expelling pregnant schoolgirls constituted a violation of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, particularly the rights to education, health, dignity, and non-discrimination.

Six girls who were pregnant were expelled from the school. The committee urged Tanzania to reform its education policies.

Dr. Godfrey Kangaude, an expert on Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights based in Malawi, said there is a tussle between the gatekeepers who think the SHR issues are for the civil society to handle.

“But I think this is closest to us. Sex and reproduction are relevant to everyone,” said Kangaude while speaking to the East Africa Law Society on litigating for sexual health rights.

He said sexual and reproductive justice is closely interrelated with finance and labor justice and generally the overall well-being of humans.

Kagaunde explained that in Malawi and other countries in the region, there are anomalies when it comes to the age of consent.

“In Malawi, the law says an adult cannot have sex with a child. Okay, we want to protect children. Isn’t it? But the line has been so rigid that an 18-year-old boy can’t have sex with a 17-year-old girl, because a 17-year-old is a minor and an 18-year-old is an adult. We understand that we want to protect people from harmful sexual conduct, especially children, but the law shouldn’t just be arbitrary. It should take into account that the 17-year-old and 18-year-old are peers.”

Criminalization of Consensual Sex 

Kangaunde and others argue that rights-based reform is needed. Laws should be gender-neutral, orientation-neutral, and distinguish exploitative adult–child sex from non-exploitative peer sex. Kangaude points to alternatives like multi-stage consent and close-in-age (“Romeo & Juliet”) exemptions.

Kangaunde and others have been criticized over their stance on the age of consent to sex and access for individuals younger than 18 to access contraceptives and safe abortion services.

“But look, there is a 19-year-old boy who is being charged with the offense of having sex with a girlfriend of 17. I mean, for him, life just went crazy. He is at school, and he had to stop schooling,” said Kangaude, the director at Nyale Institute. His institute provides legal support and engages in strategic litigation to protect and promote sexual and reproductive health rights.

Activists have since 2017 been pushing for a regional Sexual Reproductive Health Rights law. They contend that across East Africa, sexual and reproductive health rights have been narrowly defined as standalone rights.

If enacted, it would require the EAC member states to harmonize provisions on sexual and reproductive health services and information.

The bill has, however, faced significant resistance based especially on social and cultural barriers. The resistance has focused on aspects of comprehensive sex education for teenagers and provisions regarding legal abortion.

Dr. Tom Mulisa, a human rights and constitutional law researcher based at the University of Rwanda, told IPS that sexual and reproductive health rights are broad.

“Constitutions have those rights, and national health laws and policies have those rights, we are talking about the right to health, which most constitutions have, and we are talking about the right to privacy, the right to information, and sexual and reproductive health rights,” he said.

The partner states have ratified the Maputo protocol, which allows for the termination of pregnancy. The protocol is the main regional instrument that advances women’s rights especially sexual and reproductive health rights. The protocol also provides for elimination of discrimination and prohibition of harmful practices, such as female genital cutting.

Within the region, some countries have ratified the protocol, others have not and others have ratified it with reservations. Enforcement of the protocol has been split, making it difficult for all to enjoy the broader rights therein.

Kenya made reservations about Article (14), which provides for safe and legal abortion. Kenya’s constitution, on the other hand, provides for a right to legal and safe abortion when the life of the mother or fetus is at threat.

Learning From Advances in Rwanda

Rwanda has made significant progress in improving the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) of its population, especially young individuals. Like many countries in the region, it had post-colonial laws. It embarked on reform since 2009. The reforms laid the groundwork for what many describe as a flexible system.

Earlier this month, Rwanda’s Parliament passed a new law granting adolescent girls the right to access Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) services—particularly family planning—without requiring parental consent. It lowered the legal age to access contraceptives from 18-15.

Mulisa stated that the country modified its new penal code by eliminating the court’s requirement for an abortion. The penal code also included sexual reproductive health rights.

“Previously, the government held the right to health, while individuals were obligated to comply with it. But now the constitution has an explicit right to health,” revealed Mulisa, the founder of the Great Lakes Initiative For Human Rights and Development, which does public interest litigation in Rwanda.

It is now a crime under the penal code in Rwanda if a woman is denied access to contraceptives. And there are fewer restrictions on safe abortion following the removal of the court order requirement.

Rwanda’s ministerial order on abortion defines the right to health more broadly, incorporating the scope outlined by the WHO.

According to the WHO, the right to health includes four essential, interrelated elements: availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality.

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Dignitaries, including several heads of state and leaders of international organizations, joined Rwanda for the 30th commemoration of the Genocide Against the Tutsi, also known as Kwibuka 30. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI , Apr 8 2024 (IPS)

A minute of silence was observed on April 7 across Rwanda as the country held a memorial ceremony to mourn more than one million people, overwhelmingly Tutsis, who were systematically killed in the 100 days of atrocities between April and July 1994.

The Rwandan government’s commemoration marking the 30th anniversary of the 1994 Rwandan genocide against Tutsi raised the curtain on a three-month remembrance period. The event was attended by current and former heads of state and government, including former US President Bill Clinton, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and other visiting guests who also laid wreaths at the memorial earlier Sunday, April 7.

The genocide claimed the lives of 1,074,017 people, mainly ethnic Tutsis. The killing spree began immediately after a plane carrying former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira, was shot down over Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, on April 6, 1994.

The annual commemoration is to be held every year from April 7 to July 4, in line with the period of the genocide.

As Rwanda marks the 30th anniversary of genocide, people from all walks of life pay tribute to the victims who lost their lives during those horrific 100 days during various ceremonies, like here in Gicumbi, a district in northern Rwanda. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

The commemoration, named Kwibuka (meaning ‘remember’), started with the laying of wreaths at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, the final resting place for more than 250,000 victims of the genocide, followed by a commemoration ceremony.

Marie Louise Ayinkamiye, a genocide survivor who was 11 years old during the genocide and lived in Nyange village in western Rwanda. She said that the impact of genocide continues long after the killing has ended. Survivors are now tapping into their inner resilience and facing life’s challenges with courage and determination.

“My oldest son is the same age as I was during the genocide… I was born and grew up experiencing discrimination because of my ethnicity. Now 30 years on, life in Rwanda looks very different,” the mother of five told the mourners at Kigali Arena

As Rwanda marks the 30th anniversary of the Genocide, authorities emphasize the need to provide survivors with strategies to help them navigate their healing journey, build resilience, and recreate a better future for the children and generations to come.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame told hundreds of people, including senior officials and senior delegations from several countries who turned out to observe the ceremony, that only a new generation of young people has the ability to renew and redeem a nation after a genocide.

“Our job was to provide the space and the tools for them to break the cycle (…) and they have,” Kagame said.

Official estimates show that about 78 percent of Rwandans are below 35 years of age. The majority either have no memory of the genocide or were not yet born

“Our youth are the guardians of our future and the foundation of our unity, with a mindset that is totally different from the generation before,” Kagame said.

The latest Rwanda Reconciliation Barometer, published by the government, shows that the status of reconciliation in Rwanda moved from 82.3 percent in 2010 to 92.5 percent in 2015 and to 94.7 percent in 2020.

Another factor the reconciliation barometers presented as hindering reconciliation was the fact that some Rwandans still viewed themselves and others through ethnic lenses.

Rwandans, according to the official report, feel attached to their national identity, which would make reconciliation highly possible, as it would mean that they have overcome tendencies to associate themselves and others with ethnic-specific identities.

However, many respondents to the survey confessed that if people were not careful, the genocide ideology could continue to be disseminated among the youth and create an environment for a genocide to happen again.

According to the latest findings by the former government’s National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, some of these people with “genocide ideology” know the government does not support such divisive practices; they hide their feelings but still live a divided life, which is why all actors have to continue engaging more with unity and reconciliation.

The Rwandan president observed that it was all Rwandans who had conquered fear.

“Nothing can be worse than what we have already experienced. This is a nation of 14 million people who are ready to confront any attempt to take us backwards,” the Rwandan leader said.

The latest estimates by Never Again Rwanda, one of the local non-governmental organizations working to build trust and promote trauma healing and genocide prevention, show that social mistrust, suspicion, and fears stemming from wounds directly and indirectly related to the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda remain.

The organization notes that though Rwanda has achieved significant development gains and stability since the genocide, efforts towards long-term sustainable peace must be sensitive to the presence of trauma within Rwandan society and seek to redress it.

The 2018 Rwanda’s comprehensive mental-health survey, conducted by the Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC) shows that about 28% of genocide survivors reported post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, compared with 3.6% of the general population.

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Rwanda is using drone technology as an effective and innovative way of eradicating malaria in breeding sites. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Feb 8 2024 (IPS)

Experts recommend that the current prevention of malaria in highly endemic countries in Africa should integrate “locally appropriate” control measures to cope with the highest burden of mosquito-borne disease on the continent.

The latest 2023 World Malaria Report shows that the life-threatening disease remains a significant public health challenge, with both malaria incidence and mortality higher now than they were before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic on the African continent.

According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report, the effects of climate change and other issues pose a threat to the advancement of the disease-fighting effort.

Official statistics show that the African region disproportionally bore the brunt of the malaria burden in 2022, accounting for 94 percent of global malaria cases and 95 percent of all malaria deaths, which were estimated at 608,000, a nearly 6 percent increase since 2019.

WHO’s Africa office’s Tropical and Vector Borne Disease Lead, Dr. Dorothy Fosah-Achu, told IPS that vector control interventions in Africa have remained challenged, with bednets being one of the most effective vector control tools the continent is relying on.

“Most endemic countries [in Africa] are adopting new treated bednets to replace those having the issue with resistance, but these improved nets are more expensive, which makes it challenging for countries to cover large zones using this intervention,” Fosah-Achu said in an exclusive interview.

The latest WHO report on malaria places a special focus on climate change as a critical factor threatening progress in the fight against malaria. Climate-related disruptions, such as extreme weather events, may have exacerbated the spread of the disease.

Alongside climate change, other issues are threatening efforts to fight malaria.

The funding gap has grown, the report says. “Total spending in 2022 reached USD 4.1 billion—well below the USD 7.8 billion required globally to stay on track for the global milestones of reducing case incidence and mortality rates by at least 90 percent by 2030 (compared with a 2015 baseline).” This funding would include both control, diagnosis, preventative therapies, and treatment.

Growing resistance to available control tools, such as insecticides and antimalarial drugs, remains an increasing concern.

According to experts, most African countries do not have enough bednets.  They do have insecticides that can be used to spray homes at breeding sites, but those interventions are very expensive.

While the high proportion of the population without access to quality medicines for malaria in Africa continues to be another issue, Fosah-Achu is convinced that the consequence of high mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa is also related to the limited health facilities and hospitals that provide access to treatment in a timely manner to the population living in remote zones.

In addition, health experts say that any success of antimalarial interventions in endemic countries in Africa will require appropriate coordination of efforts in terms of fighting against the resistance of vectors to insecticides and the resistance of parasites to medicines.

According to experts, another challenge is that endemic countries in Africa have technical capacity gaps because their national health facilities are not equipped with the right human resources who are able to manage programs and monitor some of these biological threats, such as vector resistance.

The latest estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO) show that in Africa, an estimated 233 million cases of malaria occur each year, resulting in approximately 1 million deaths. More than 90 percent of these are in children under five. Official statistics show that currently the African region bears the heaviest malaria burden, with 94 percent of cases and 95 percent of deaths globally, representing 233 million malaria cases and 580,000 deaths.

Dr. Ludoviko Zirimenya, a medical researcher at the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI), told IPS that the changing climate across many endemic regions in Africa poses a substantial risk to progress against malaria.

“Africa is the most affected due to a combination of factors, the major one being climate change,” Zirimenya said.

In Rwanda, like other endemic countries across Africa, malaria is often found in rainy seasons, and meteorological factors and altitude are described by experts as the major drivers of malaria incidence on the continent.

Both Zirimenya and Fosah-Achu believe that the burden of malaria transmission on the continent can be reduced when countries put in place appropriate mechanisms to strengthen the data management system to ensure they have strong surveillance systems.

Public health experts observe that climate change is a growing issue, and countries in some endemic countries have little support to set up programmes to counter its impact.

The WHO report acknowledges this saying: “Equally crucial is the need to position the fight against malaria within the climate change/health nexus and to equip communities to anticipate, adapt to, and mitigate the effects of climate change, including the rise of extreme weather events. As you will see in the report, there are a range of actions—strategic, technical, and operational—that countries and their partners should begin to pursue now.”

Currently, numerous interventions to control malaria have been implemented across many African countries, but experts note that the incidence of the killer disease has increased in recent years.

“There are financial capacity gaps to be filled by some countries. Most African governments still need to learn how to mobilize resources and ensure that [malaria interventions] programs deliver on the plans that they have developed themselves,” Fosah-Achu said.

Despite these challenges, there have also been achievements. Recent progress includes the launch of the first malaria vaccine, RTS,S/AS01, and the endorsement by WHO of a second vaccine, R21/Matrix-M. Additionally, the use of new dual-active ingredient insecticide-treated nets and expanded malaria prevention for high-risk children have been crucial advancements, offering new avenues for combating the disease.

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Young Rwandan citizen scientists record bird sounds in the forests in a project that plays a pivotal role in the country's bird protection. Credit: Planet Birdsong Foundation

By Aimable Twahirwa
NYAMASHEKE, RWANDA, Jan 23 2024 (IPS)

Claver Ntoyinkima wakes up early in the morning, at least three times a week, and goes into the Nyungwe rainforest to record bird vocalizations.

Ntoyinkima is one of several community members in a remote village in rural southwestern Rwanda who volunteer with a group of scientists to help boost wildlife conservation.

Relying on a voice application installed on his mobile phone, which is connected to a parabolic reflector with a dedicated cable, the 50-year-old tour guide and his team walk long distances every week to collect sounds from various birding hotspots in this area.

“Love for birds is critical when it comes to engaging many young people in this career,” Ntoyinkima told IPS while referring to his second profession of bird sound recording.

To better protect the birds, the veteran tour guide has been able to launch the Nyungwe Birding Club, bringing together about 86 members of local communities living in Gisakura, a remote village located on the outskirts of the Nyungwe rainforest in southwestern Rwanda. Thanks to this mobilization, members of the club, which also consists of 26 young students from primary and secondary schools, were equipped with skills on how to record bird sounds.

The initiative is part of joint efforts by the Planet Birdsong Foundation, an international UK-based charity organization, and the Center of Excellence in Biodiversity and Natural Resource Management at University of Rwanda seeking to connect people with nature through bird sound listening, recording, and audio processing.

Conservation experts believe that birds are important indicators for the biodiversity and health of a habitat where they are sometimes visible but more widely audible. Researchers are now convinced that audio recognition skills are vital for effective monitoring and guiding, especially in forests and wetlands.

“We are engaging youth from rural communities through local bird clubs, site guides, schools, and colleges,” Hilary MacBean, trustee of the Foundation, told IPS.

It is a major task to collect mass data covering the sounds of various species across various birding hotspots in this East African country.

Nyungwe natural reserve is known to be home to 278 species of birds—26 of those are found only in the few forests of the Albertine Rift. The latest scientific estimates show that there are seven other important birding areas in Rwanda, including three wetland areas at Akanyaru (south), Nyabarongo river system (south), and Rugezi swamp (north), where there are efforts to recover the biodiversity from human activities that led to the degradation of these hotspots. The urban wetland in Kigali city has also received massive investment and is radically improving.

“This task requires much practice for people so that they are able to decode all those different bird songs and calls,” Ntoyinkima said.

At present, the first ever Rwandan citizen science initiative, which has been running since 2021, focuses on equipping young students, many from rural communities, with the skills to observe, audio record, and scientifically label birds by their sounds, songs, and calls.

By using affordable sound recording equipment aimed at entry-level citizen scientists, participants are trained in audio-data collection, verification, preparation, and storage for both higher-level scientists and other citizen scientists.  Currently, different existing teams deployed across birding hotspots in Rwanda are divided into categories, including recordists and verifiers.

Experts also point out that using the available dataset with multiple records of the songs and calls of the bird population has been crucial to ensuring the protection of species that are forest-dependent.

Through the “Bioacoustics Recording” initiative, which the foundation and other stakeholders jointly run, MacBean has been involved in mentoring and training young bird guides from Rwanda for international tourism while also educating local guides and students about bird sounds.

Hilary MacBean of the Planet Birdsong Foundation has been involved in mentoring and training Rwandan young bird guides for international tourism while bringing awareness and knowledge of bird sounds to local guides and students. Credit: Planet Birdsong Foundation

“Key focus has been on equipping communities with skills on how to work with bioacoustics data collected in the field as a means to identify bird species in the recordings with confidence,” she said in an exclusive interview.

During the implementation phase, data collection is done by using a smart phone with downloadable free apps and a ParaChirp, an acoustic parabolic reflector designed for educational use to promote learning about birds and product design.  The technology focuses mainly on individual bird songs and calls collected in their natural or semi-natural habitat.

The latest official estimates by the Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA) show that Rwanda boasts more than 703 bird species, making it one of the countries with the highest concentration of bird populations in Africa.

However, Protais Niyigaba, the Nyungwe Forest National Park’s manager, told IPS that much effort has been put into providing migratory birds with safe habitats and breeding sites.

“These solutions with available recording data are currently helping to understand the routes of these migratory birds and make sure visitors are able to locate them easily by sound,” Niyigaba said.

The project had uploaded 226 recordings as of the time of the Foundation’s 2023 audit report, with 37 of those being in national parks. The number of recordings is constantly growing, with multiple records of the songs and calls of about 120 bird species across Rwanda.

By December 2024, the Foundation has set a goal of generating 275 recordings, including 75 bird sounds, from existing national parks across Rwanda. The target set for 2025 is 300 species, according to official projections.

“We create music from bird sound and, in the Rwandan context, focus on the community benefits of citizen science, bird sound collection for scientific monitoring, and building the identification skills of tourist guides,” MacBean said.

With this integration of bird sound recordings to protect and preserve these species and their habitats, stakeholders focus on labeling the collected data so that their identification, locational and time data, behavioral data, and habitat data are all recorded. The sounds are then validated by assigned verifiers, processed, and stored for use in science.

Recordings generated by Planet Birdsong’s citizen scientists are stored globally with e-bird, and researchers are collaborating with the Macaulay Library at Cornell University to ensure access to locally recorded bird sounds for both citizen scientists and specialists.

For the specific case of Rwanda, data collected in Rwanda is also supplied to the Rwanda Biodiversity Information System developed by the Centre of Excellence in Biodiversity and Natural Resource Management at University of Rwanda for use in local natural science. Yet these innovations are playing pivotal roles in Rwanda’s bird protection, and some researchers believe that maintaining data availability is essential for effective bird biodiversity conservation.

Professor Beth Kaplin, a prominent conservation scientist based in Rwanda, told IPS that getting local researchers, students, and youth involved in data collection and management is important to developing a sense of ownership and stewardship of the data recording for bird sounds.

Despite current efforts, conservation experts point out that limited funding to support people and pay their fieldwork expenses is another major challenge affecting project implementation since the majority of local residents work mainly on a volunteer basis. Some individuals engaged in the project also have problems with equipment such as phones and PCs, plus the cost of the internet.

Dr Marie Laure Rurangwa, a Rwandan female conservation scientist, told IPS that one of the challenges facing people engaged in this activity is much about processing time with much editing [of recordings] and the skillsets needed in terms of sound recognition for different bird species.

Rurangwa is a co-author of the latest peer review study showing how land use change (modification from primary forest to other land use types) has affected bird communities within Nyungwe forest in Rwanda

“Access to some of these remote birding hotspots has been another challenge for recordists because of limited resources and a lack of appropriate equipment to reach these remote areas,” Rurangwa points out.

But in Gisakura, a remote village nestled on the outskirts of Nyungwe Forest, Ntoyinkima and his team are trying to use affordable means in their field recording by splitting into small groups of five people each.

Before their deployment to various sites inside and outside the forest, each group has to travel several kilometers to reach the selected birding hotspots.

As they walk quietly along a narrow trail and water flows beneath their feet, the team has to stop sometimes to better identify birds through their vocalizations.

Yet most trained people are able to capture data and generate robust, sound recognition results. Expert verifiers are sometimes asked to provide support when some recordists are stuck for identification or to confirm when in doubt.

“These young people are still volunteering here, but in most cases, the majority of them end up being hired as tour guides because they are well trained in bird vocalizations,” Ntoyinkima said.

Credit: Visuals for video are by Aimable Twahirwa and Planet Birdsong Foundation

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BioNTainers, facilities equipped to manufacture a range of mRNA-based vaccines have been inaugurated in Rwanda in December 2023. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Jan 8 2024 (IPS)

An agreement signed between the Rwandan government and the Africa Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation (APTF) gives impetus to Africa’s domestic industry with the hope of helping the continent tackle vaccine inequity and fill the critical gap in vaccine manufacturing.

The agreement to operationalize the foundation was signed in Kigali, Rwanda, in late 2023.

What is important, according to stakeholders, is to focus efforts on building a resilient and self-reliant pharmaceutical industry for the continent. This became apparent during COVID-19, when, for example, COVAX, a multilateral mechanism for equitable global access to COVID-19 vaccines, helped lower-income economies achieve two-dose coverage of 57 percent, compared to the global average of 67 percent.

Both officials and scientists take delight in pointing out that the benefit of having such an initiative is to close the vaccine equity gap between African countries and the world’s developed nations.

During the implementation phase, the African Development Bank (ADB) has committed to investing up to USD 3 billion over the next decade in the development of pharmaceutical products.

The foundation, which is ready to hit the ground running in January 2024, will dedicate its core mandate to addressing some of the common challenges facing African indigenous pharmaceutical companies, including weak human and institutional capacities and low technical capacity for using and applying new technologies.

“The Foundation was a pledge that Africa will have what it needs to build its own health defense system, which must include a thriving African pharmaceutical industry and a quality healthcare infrastructure, ADB President Dr Akinwumi Adesina said.

These solutions, according to experts, aim to close technical capacity gaps in their use and lack the ability to focus on the production of basic active pharmaceutical ingredients for drugs or antigens for vaccines.

Professor Padmashree Gehl Sampath, Chief Executive Officer of the APTF, told IPS that access to know-how, technologies, and processes for manufacturing pharmaceutical products is clearly needed on the continent to ensure the sustainability of financial investments.

She, however, points out that, with the current move to ensure the sustainability and reliability of the domestic pharmaceutical industry in Africa, it is not enough just to have financial, infrastructural, strategic, and regulatory support.

“There is a need for a clear and coherent focus on technology transfer and knowledge sharing for capacity building and diversification within the pharmaceutical value chain,” she said in an exclusive interview.

While technology is described as the main transformative tool that will enable the development of a competitive pharmaceutical industry in Africa, Sampath stresses the need to build policy capacity to facilitate the sector.

According to her, this can be done by implementing the flexibilities contained in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property and then also enabling local companies to access domestic markets.

In a move to overcome these challenges, the foundation’s work received a major boost with a memorandum of understanding signed in December 2023 in Kigali, Rwanda, to partner with the European Investment Bank.

The European Investment Bank will be a partner in the foundation’s “regional biosimilars program for the production and innovation of relevant biosimilars in Africa and to facilitate the creation of common active pharmaceutical ingredients parks in any chosen specific sub-region of Africa,” the organization said in a press release.

According to Sampath, there is a need to remove barriers to domestic innovation in Africa.

“We need to work with our universities and public research institutions to transform them into centers of excellence,” she said.

During the implementation phase, the first modular elements of the German company’s factory, BioNTech, based on shipping containers, were delivered to the Kigali construction site in March and were then assembled to form the so-called BioNTainers that were inaugurated in December 2023.

The company, which developed the most widely used COVID-19 vaccine in the Western world with its U.S. partner Pfizer, developed a plan in 2022 to allow African countries to produce its Comirnaty-branded vaccine under the supervision of BioNTech.

BioNTech said the initial vaccine factory could, over the next few years, be part of a wider supply network spanning several African countries, including Senegal and South Africa.

At the time BioNTech announced plans to expand into Africa, the shipment of coronavirus vaccine doses manufactured in the West to the continent had been delayed, which had been the subject of much criticism.

“The African Union has come together to make a firm commitment not to find ourselves in this situation again,” Rwandan President Paul Kagame said at the inauguration ceremony of the plant site located in Masoro, a suburb of Kigali.

The company, which developed the most widely used COVID-19 vaccine in the Western world with its U.S. partner Pfizer, developed a plan in 2022 to allow African countries to produce its Comirnaty-branded vaccine under the supervision of BioNTech.

“What BionTech’s partnership with Africa demonstrates is that vaccine technology can be democratized, but we could not have reached this point without a wider set of partnerships.” Kagame said.

Gelsomina Vigliotti, Vice President at the European Investment Bank, said that the bank is committed to working with its partners to strengthen public health and health innovation across Africa.

“Strengthening access to finance is essential to scaling up pharmaceutical investment and innovation across Africa,” Vigliotti said.

An important manifestation of Africa’s scientific and technological innovation capability, according to experts, is the application of innovations to its pharmaceutical industry development.

The newly-established plant, located in the suburb of Rwanda’s capital city, Kigali, is expected to start by producing 50 million vaccines, but production will increase depending on the demand for mRNA-based vaccine candidates to address malaria and tuberculosis.

But researchers and policymakers argue that trust and cooperation are critical for the successful implementation of this innovation.

The latest estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO) show that industrial development should be combined with national policy for universal health coverage so that local vaccine production can address local health needs.

Before the inauguration of the BionTech factory in Rwanda, there were fewer than 10 African manufacturers with vaccine production, which are based in five countries: Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia.

The capability to produce vaccines in Africa, according to the UN agency, requires a fully integrated approach, pulling together some key elements including finance, skills development, regulatory facilities, and technology know-how.

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An artist’s impression of the completed Centre of Excellence in Kigali. The center supported by IRCAD is expected to assist with the training of surgeons throughout the continent with minimally invasive surgery training. Credit: Supplied

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Nov 13 2023 (IPS)

In a newly established Centre of Excellence located in Masaka, a suburb of the Rwandan capital city, Kigali, an expanded lab, complete with innovative facilities and specialized instruments, is now giving surgeons a conducive environment to simulate how to perform minimally invasive surgeries.

French-based Institute for Research into Cancer of the Digestive System (IRCAD) played a major part in this initiative, the first ever on the African continent.

According to medical experts, in comparison to traditional open surgery, often requiring the patient to incur invasive large incisions, minimally invasive surgery procedures allow doctors to insert a camera through a small incision, or sometimes no incision at all.

Dr Alexandre Hostettler, head of the Surgical Data Science Team at IRCAD, pointed out that harnessing robotic and artificial intelligence is critical to enhance the capability of surgical treatment in Africa.

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery denotes the surgical technique where the robot-applied laparoscopic tools are remotely controlled by a human operator at a console.

“Performing surgeries using robotic assistance can be more comfortable for surgeons, as they can sit at a console rather than standing for extended periods, reducing physical strain,” he told IPS.

The center also aims to train medical doctors from across Africa about how to perform surgery using very small incisions, allowing the introduction of an endoscope connected to a camera with a magnified image leading to a very precise dissection of the operated organs.

Prof Jacques Marescaux, President and Founder of IRCAD, is convinced that the new center represents a turning point in surgical education and practice in Rwanda and sub-Saharan Africa. “The center is a catalyst for all African surgeons and computer scientists,” he said in an exclusive interview with IPS.

At the same time, Rwanda is striving to build an integrated medical service system that provides high-quality services and is efficient in medical facility management. Rwandan President Paul Kagame believes the key task is to keep investing significantly in public health infrastructure.

“The [new] Centre of Excellence is not serving Rwanda alone. It is serving Africa. It is also improving and taking beyond the talent we have in Africa to a much higher level,” Kagame said at the inauguration of the new facility, for which operations and running costs will be fully funded by the Government of Rwanda and IRCAD France.

Some medical experts observe that despite its numerous advantages over traditional surgery, especially the shorter hospital stay and less blood loss with lower overall costs, the new robotic surgery is not widespread in low- and middle-income countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In addition, some researchers argue that computer-assisted navigation and robotics are sometimes challenging to use by perioperative nurses when caring for patients undergoing these procedures.

Dr Christine Mutegaraba, a surgeon from one of the private clinics in Kigali, told IPS that providing appropriate training remains critical for specialized medical practitioners to rely on these robotic surgery systems.

“Huge investment is also needed to ensure that clinics and other specialized referral hospitals are equipped with devices needed to perform these kind of surgical techniques,” Mutegaraba said.

According to the data from Rwanda’s Ministry of Health, laparoscopic was the sole type of minimally invasive surgical technique used by few medical practitioners across the country, and there wasn’t any formal training in place to develop the technical skills for additional doctors.

With the inauguration of the new center, both officials and health experts see hope in developing and advancing this technology, where specialized medical doctors will now be able to perform various kinds of surgeries.

While the introduction of innovative solutions in the health sector remains exciting for health officials, Marescaux points out that the new robotic technology is set to provide patients with high-quality medical services.

“We are working on building the largest team combined with computer scientists and surgeons in Africa,” he said.

Estimates by IRCAD show that access to surgical care in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), such as countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, is still extremely limited, which causes a burden on the health care systems.

It said thanks to the center, African surgeons will not have to travel across the continent to receive the best training in surgery since it will be available right at home.

The 2022 World Health Organization’s study shows that strong measures are also needed to boost the training and recruitment of health workers in Africa.

Whereas the UN agency recommends that African countries significantly increase investments in building the health workforce to meet their current and future needs, new findings show that that the region has a ratio of 1.55 health workers (physicians, nurses, and midwives) per 1000 people.

Experts now believe that robotic technology will also lessen surgeon’s workload by efficiently managing the patient flow.

“As technology evolves, robotic systems are likely to incorporate more advanced features, integrating AI, augmented reality, and other technologies to aid the surgical process,” Hostettler said.

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Shabana Basij-Rasikh, co-founder and President of SOLA, speaks at the Women Deliver conference in Rwanda. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Aug 1 2023 (IPS)

When providing education to her small group of Afghan girls, who had been studying at a boarding school back home, became tenuous, Shabana Basij-Rasikh, relocated them to Rwanda.

She had set up a pioneering school under the project SOLA, the Afghan word for peace, and a short form for School of Leadership Afghanistan. But as the Taliban swept to power in August 2021, she closed the doors of the school, destroyed any school records which could help identify the girls, and on August 25, relocated 250 members of the SOLA community, including the student body and graduates from the programme, totally more than 100 girls, to Rwanda.

Basij-Rasikh, co-founder and SOLA’s President said a major challenge had been the lack of resources and capacity to teach Afghan girls after the return of the Taliban deprived right to education of girls in secondary schools and above.

As the Taliban swept back into power in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, Shabana Basij-Rasikh, the founder of the nation’s only all-girls boarding school, initially ran the school out of a former principal’s living room. But that soon became untenable.

Speaking on the sidelines of The Women Deliver 2023 Conference (WD2023), which took place in Kigali from 17-20 July 2023, Basij-Rasikh, who completed her undergraduate studies in the United States, explained that when Kabul fell under the control of the Taliban, she managed within a short time to evacuate the entire school community to Rwanda.

“Although we managed to move the school to a safe country, it is still embarrassing and shameful for me since Afghanistan is the only country in the world where women and girls’ access to education has been suspended,” she said.

Initially, SOLA started as a scholarship program where Afghan youth would be identified and could access quality education abroad and, later on, go back to their home country as highly-skilled Afghans in whichever profession they chose.

“When the US announced that they were to withdraw their troops in Afghanistan, it created a lot of anxiety among young Afghans who were in the West hoping to return to the country.”

Basij-Rasikh regrets that some of her former students, who were able to leave Afghanistan after the Taliban’s return, are still struggling to continue their education overseas.

“We wish to see many Afghan girls return to schools,” she said, explaining that the migration status of the students in many countries restricted their access to education.

Since the school opened last year’s admissions season, Shabana Basij-Rasikh and her team have been inviting Afghan girls worldwide to apply and join the rest in Rwanda. Last year they enrolled 27 girls in their first intake.

“The major challenge is that there are several hundreds of thousands of girls who want to join our campus, but space is limited, and so places are being granted on merit and need,” Shabana told IPS.

Shabana argues investing in girls’ education is a smart investment; she is convinced that the current situation in Afghanistan must and should not be accepted or supported by any country around the world.

On September 18, 2021, a month after taking over the country, the Taliban ordered the reopening of only boys’ secondary schools. A few months later, in March 2022, according to human rights organizations, the Taliban again pledged to reopen all schools, but they officially closed girls’ secondary schools.

“These girls deserve the opportunity to realize their full potential, and the international community has an important role to play,” Shabana said.

UNESCO’s latest figures show that 2,5 million or 80 percent of school-aged Afghan girls and women are out of school.  The order suspending university education for women, announced in December last year, affects more than 100,000 students attending government and private institutions, according to the UN agency.

On the sidelines of the Women Deliver Conference 2023, Senegalese President Macky Sall pledged that his government would offer 100 scholarships for women who have seen their right to education decimated under Taliban rule in Afghanistan to pursue their university degrees in Senegal.

Rwanda is one of several African countries that agreed to temporarily host evacuated Afghans.

Sall, who was reacting to the concerns raised by Basij-Rasikhat, said his Government was ready to give chance to Afghan girls to pursue their studies.

So far, SOLA school has received 2,000 applications across 20 countries where some Afghans are living.

In 2022, it received 180 applications from Afghans living in 10 countries, but only 27 girls were admitted.

“That explains how families in Afghanistan are ready to support the girls in moving abroad to pursue their education,” Shabana said.

“Boarding schools that allow Afghan girls to study and live together are the best way to promote their education.”

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Scientists have recently unveiled a first-ever weather forecasting model using artificial intelligence (AI) aimed at creating resilience in Africa. Credit: Kureng Dapel/World Meteorological Organization

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Jul 20 2023 (IPS)

Scientists have recently unveiled a first-ever weather forecasting model using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning solutions to help vulnerable African countries build resilience to climate impacts.

Researchers from the Kigali-based African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) are working on a new AI algorithm that allows various end users of weather predictions to make data-driven decisions.

According to climate experts, these efforts focus on building an intelligent weather forecasting system that is multi-dimensional and updated in real-time with a long-range and is a technology capable of simulating long-term predictions much more quickly than traditional weather models.

“Key to these interventions is to improve the accuracy of weather forecasting and help African governments better prepare for and respond to weather emergencies,” Dr Sylla Mouhamadou Bamba told IPS.

Bamba is the lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report 6 (AR6) for the Working Group 1 contribution: The Physical Science Basis and African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) – Canada Research Chair in Climate Change Science based in Kigali, Rwanda.

The AI model currently being tested by researchers from the Kigali-based Centre of Excellence focuses on analyzing huge data sets from past weather patterns to predict future events more efficiently and accurately than traditional methods commonly used by national meteorological agencies in Africa.

The first-ever machine learning model, which researchers are currently testing, focuses on analyzing huge data sets from past weather patterns to predict future events more efficiently and accurately than traditional methods to boost climate resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

Rather than working out what the weather will generally be like in a given region or area to get forecasts, Bamba points out that developing modern statistical models using a machine learning approach to forecast sunlight, temperature, wind speed, and rainfall has the potential to predict climate change with efficient use of learning algorithms, and sensing device.

Although most national meteorological agencies in Africa have tried to enhance the accuracy of their weather forecasts, scientists say that although current technologies can forecast weather over the next few days, they cannot predict the climate over the next few years.

“Many African countries are still struggling to take measures in preventing major climate-related disaster risks in an effective manner because of lack of long-term adaptation plans,” Dr Bamba says.

The latest findings by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) show that as the global climate further warms, the long-term adverse effects and extreme weather events brought about by climate change will pose an increasingly serious threat to Africa’s economic development.

The limited resilience of African countries against the negative impacts of today’s climate is already resulting in lower growth and development, highlighting the consequences of an adaptation deficit, it said.

Indicative findings by economic experts show lower GDP growth per capita ranging, on average, from 10 to 13 per cent (with a 50 per cent confidence interval), with the poorest countries in Africa displaying the highest adaptation deficit.

While projections show that climate change is likely to exacerbate the high vulnerability, the limited adaptive capacity of the majority of African countries, particularly the poorest, will potentially roll back development efforts in the most-affected nations, Dr Andre Kamga, the Director General of the African Centre of Meteorological Applications for Development (ACMAD). This highlighted the need to build high-resolution models.

Apart from exploiting processes to achieve early warning for all in the current climate value chain Dr Kamga stresses the pressing need to move to impact-based forecasts to enhance the quality of information given to users and to expect more efficient preparedness and response.

While Africa has contributed negligibly to the changing climate, with just about two to three percent of global emissions, the continent still stands out disproportionately as the most vulnerable region globally.

The latest report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)  indicates that most of these vulnerable countries lack the resources to afford goods and services to buffer themselves and recover from the worst of the changing climate effects.

While AI and machine learning remain key solutions for researchers to overcome these challenges, Prof. Sam Yala, Centre President at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Rwanda, is convinced that these modern weather forecasting models are important to help manage challenging issues related to improving adaptation and resilience in most African countries.

Frank Rutabingwa, Senior Regional Advisor, UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the Coordinator Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa Programme (WISER), acknowledges that for African countries to prevent and control major climate-related disaster risks effectively, it is important to improve their forecasting and information interpretation capacities.

Latest estimates by researchers show that the skill of numerical weather prediction over Africa is still low, and there remains a widespread lack of provision of nowcasting across the continent and virtually no use of automated systems or tools.

Scientists from AIMS are convinced that this situation has significantly affected the ability of national meteorological services to issue warnings and, therefore, potentially prevent the loss of life and significant financial losses in many countries across the continent.

In Africa, a study by Dr Sylla projected an extension of torrid climate throughout West Africa by the end of the 21st century. However, other African regions, such as North Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa, lack this information.

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning can play a critical role by filling these data gaps on the reliability of weather forecasts that undermine understanding of the climate on the continent,” he said.

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Recent trends show that African women are abandoning traditional ways of engaging in agribusiness and adopting an intellectual property approach to transform food systems on the continent. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Jun 29 2023 (IPS)

Adeline Umukunzi, a 28-year-old woman mushroom farmer in Musanze, a district located about 100 km north of the capital Kigali, said women have often been the unseen faces of agribusiness in Rwanda.

“Women have always played a vital role in agriculture, but behind the scenes. We are starting to see more and more female faces in agribusiness,” she told IPS.

While she developed high potential and locally-adapted innovations in mushroom farming, the young cultivator was unaware of how much her produce was worth to the market. Little did she know that one local food company had purchased most of her produce to process mushroom-based biscuits and nuggets.

As part of Rwanda’s agriculture transformation efforts to enhance agribusiness competitiveness, a growing number of women are now engaged in agribusiness, where many have been able to generate business benefits throughout the value chain.

Official estimates show that in Rwanda, more women than men are primarily engaged in agriculture, yet female farmers face more challenges in starting successful agribusinesses than their male counterparts.

Despite these challenges, the latest official trends show that African women are abandoning traditional ways of engaging in agribusiness and adopting intellectual property (IP) approach to transform food systems on the continent.

According to experts, adopting IP in agribusiness aims to protect goods or services produced in the sector. It mainly deals with trade secrets, described as an essential component for businesses to protect confidential information that provides them a competitive edge.

According to Olivier Kamana, Permanent Secretary in Rwanda’s Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources, adopting IP rights allows innovators to generate good profits.

Kamana told IPS that key women agripreneurs in Africa could develop commercially viable products, so there needs to be some IP protection to incentivize the innovator.

In many African countries like Rwanda, where agriculture is the backbone of their national economy, experts stress the need to embrace talent, problem-solving ability, and innovation for women.

Official estimates by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) indicate that around 62 percent of women in Africa are involved in farming and do the bulk of the work to produce, process, and market food.

According to agriculture experts, business competitiveness in the regional intra-African trading space offered by the African Continental Free Trade Agreement requires agribusiness actors to operate more efficiently, which requires investments in new technologies, new ways of fertilizing and watering crops, and new ways of connecting to the global market.

For Kamana, African women agripreneurs have access to the type of innovations they need to overcome the unique challenges they face.

During the first Africa Regional Intellectual Property (IP) Conference for Women in Agribusiness, which took place in Kigali in May 2023, delegates expressed the desire to promote innovations in women-led agribusinesses in Africa by helping them understand and use IP to bring their ideas to the world.

Bemanya Twebaze, Director General of the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO), is convinced that Intellectual property (IPR) can be a powerful tool in empowering women and guaranteeing that they benefit from their innovations and creations in the agricultural industry.

“Policymakers should encourage and facilitate IP rights for women in agriculture while providing legal and technical aid to maximize their prospects of prosperity,” he said.

Agriculture scientists have made breakthroughs in identifying the actors that can be considered innovators to bring agricultural development and increase food production in Africa by examining how intellectual property rights could be largely promoted on the continent.

Estimates show that small farmers, with the majority of women, constitute Africa’s most important and most capable innovators, yet this category of the workforce is still struggling to aggregate their produce to supply foreign markets.

Supporters of IPRs argue that though the exclusive monopoly on the invention could impact agriculture in Africa, farming communities across the continent still have difficulty innovating by incorporating new technologies or varieties coming from outside into their production systems.

After graduating from university a few years ago, Rosine Mwiseneza, a young woman agripreneur and manager of BeeGulf company based in Kigali, started beekeeping with only five hives in the Rwamagana district from Eastern Rwanda. Soon after, the number of hives increased to 15 and later to 25.

Mwiseneza told IPS that there had been plenty of opportunity for honey production in Rwanda with the possibility to generate various products across the value chain without intermediaries.

Currently, Mwiseneza’s company is producing soaps, candles, and glass containers made from raw beeswax with a target to make appropriate use of IP rights in the stage of this innovation process.

“We are looking to apply for a valid invention patent, and we are confident to get substantial profits from these innovations in the near future,” she told IPS.

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Some climate scientists said it was unfortunate that western Rwanda experienced flooding despite past investments. For example, some experts were previously convinced that Sebeya, one of the rivers originating in the mountains of western Rwanda, was no longer a threat to the community. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, May 19 2023 (IPS)

Following severe flooding and landslides that hit major parts of Rwanda earlier this month, experts are convinced that investing in the mapping of erosion risk areas could go a long way to keeping the number of casualties down.

Many villagers living along major rivers in Western Rwanda have been among the victims of river erosion and flooding every year.

Felicita Mukamusoni, a river erosion survivor in Nyundo, a mountainous village from Western Rwanda, told IPS that “parts of this village have been eroded to such an extent that we cannot even imagine.”

“I reared cows and goats. My beautiful house was destroyed. The river has taken everything,” she said.

Latest Government estimates indicate that at least 135 people died, and one is still missing following recent flooding and landslides triggered by heavy rains that hit western, northern and southern provinces earlier this month.

In a recent assessment, experts found that land in high-risk areas is mainly used for agriculture, and 61 percent was for seasonal crops. It said that seasonal agriculture exposes soil to splash erosion and further detachment as land is not permanently covered.

The 2022 report on the State of Soil Erosion Control in Rwanda indicates that the erosion control techniques across high-risk areas in Rwanda are still very low.

Erosion control mapping shows that of the 30 districts of Rwanda, land under high erosion risk is about 1,080,168 hectares (45 percent of the total provinces land, which is estimated to be 2,385,830 hectares) of which 71,941 hectares (7 percent of the total risk areas) are at extremely high risk.

According to the same report, at least 190,433 hectares of land are considered very high risk (18 percent), 300,805 hectares are at high risk (28 percent), and 516,999 hectares (48 percent) are at moderate risk.

Dr Charles Karangwa, a climate expert based in Kigali, told IPS that It is unfortunate that fresh disasters happened again despite a lot of investment in the past.

“Rwanda needs to explore other complementary solutions such as water management infrastructure, water harvesting, and where possible, relocate those living in highly risky areas to allow nature to regenerate will help to stabilise the situation both in the long term and medium term,” he said.

Apart from being highly populated, Karangwa pointed out that there is quite a link with geographical vulnerability because of soil erosion risk, which is worsened by high population, and this increased pressure on land.

Flood Management and Water Storage Development Division Manager at Rwanda’s Water Resources Board (RWB), Davis Bugingo, told IPS that among solutions to cope with recurrent disasters in Western Rwanda is the establishment of flood control infrastructures to regulate water flow and reduce flooding risks.

These include the construction of the neighbouring Sebeya retention dam, and Gisunyu gully rehabilitation works expected to significantly contribute to reducing flood impacts in the region.

While accurate and up-to-date data on river flow, topography, and flood vulnerability remains crucial for effective flood management, Bugingo observed that limited data availability and quality could pose challenges in accurate flood forecasting, risk assessment, and planning.

Apart from land use, which contributed to increased flood risks, experts observed that constructions in flood-prone areas, encroachments on riverbanks, and inadequate zoning regulations had exacerbated the impact of floods and hindered effective flood management efforts in western Rwanda.

Most recently, RWB has developed a dedicated application to collect more information to inform future analysis, relocation of people living in risky areas, and adjusting tools used to design flood control infrastructure.

The above tool provides information on flood exposure and areas at risk that can be visualised in 3D and shared the information with the public or other organisations. However, experts are convinced that despite these innovative solutions, limited financial resources may hinder the implementation of these large-scale infrastructure projects, such as dams, flood control structures, gully reclamation and drainage systems.

Rwanda is one of Africa’s most densely populated countries, with large concentrations in the central regions and along the shore of Lake Kivu in the west. This East African country’s total area is 26,338 km2, with a population of 13,246,394.

Bugingo points out that inadequate land use still contributes to increased flood risks.

“Constructions in flood-prone areas, encroachments on riverbanks, and inadequate zoning regulations continue to exacerbate the impact of floods and hinder effective flood management efforts,” he said.

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Jean Claude Muhire, Rwanda Program Director of BRAC Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative, a flagship program at BRAC International, and Samuel Dusengiyumva, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Local Government sign the MoU in Kigali, Rwanda. Credit BRAC UPGI.

By Joyce Chimbi
KIGALI, Mar 21 2023 (IPS)

Last week, BRAC International signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Government of Rwanda under the Ministry of Local Government (MINALOC) to support efforts to empower people in extreme poverty to develop sustainable livelihoods and break the poverty trap long term. This is part of the Government’s broader efforts to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030.

“I am delighted to see the Government of Rwanda take a leadership role in addressing extreme poverty,” said Greg Chen, Managing Director of BRAC Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative (UPGI), a flagship program at BRAC International.

The four essentials of the Graduation approach and initial outcomes. Credit: BRAC UPGI.

The MoU was signed on Tuesday, March 14, 2023, by Jean Claude Muhire, Rwanda Program Director of BRAC UPGI, and Samuel Dusengiyumva, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Local Government.

BRAC International is a leading nonprofit organization with a mission to empower people and communities in poverty, illiteracy, disease, and social injustice, touching the lives of more than 100 million people in the last five decades. And now seeks to touch even more lives in the land of a thousand hills through this partnership.

“We are happy to serve as a partner in advancing the Government of Rwanda’s new National Strategy for Sustainable Graduation (NSSG) and to accelerate the reduction of poverty and extreme poverty,” said Muhire.

The MoU positions BRAC International as a key partner in advancing the Government of Rwanda’s new National Strategy for Sustainable Graduation (NSSG), recently approved by Cabinet in November 2022 to accelerate the reduction of poverty and extreme poverty in Rwanda and contribute to the achievement of the targets set out in the National Strategy for Transformation, 2017 to 2024.

“We are committed to combating extreme poverty by scaling the multifaceted, evidence-based Graduation approach through governments across Africa and Asia and reaching millions more people,” Chen said.

Similar to BRAC’s Graduation approach, which was established in Bangladesh in 2002, the NSSG defines Graduation as a two-year program for households to benefit from inclusive livelihood development programs, multifaceted interventions, access to shock-responsive social protection services, and market access that creates an enabling environment for households to “graduate” out of extreme poverty.

To date, BRAC’s Graduation program has reached more than 2.1 million people in Bangladesh alone and supported the expansion of Graduation in 16 additional countries, including Afghanistan, Egypt, Guinea, India, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Pakistan, Philippines, Rwanda, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zambia.

Leveraging 20 years of experience implementing, testing, and iterating the Graduation approach, BRAC International is extending support in the design, delivery as well as evaluation of the Graduation program to Rwanda, supporting the Ministry of Local Government in critical areas.

Areas such as providing technical capacity and expertise in the implementation of the Graduation strategy and making available necessary communication, advocacy, and technical resources to ensure smooth implementation of the Graduation strategy.

Equally important, collaborating with the Ministry will ensure the scale-up of an inclusive, holistic Graduation strategy that includes all Graduation essentials. In all, efforts will focus on the four essential components identified as fundamental to implementing Graduation successfully.

These essential components include meeting participants’ day-to-day needs such as nutrition and healthcare, providing training and assets for income generation, financial literacy and savings support, and social empowerment through community engagement and life skills training – all facilitated through coaching that calls for regular interactions with participants. Rigorous research by Nobel Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo proves that the combination of support and resources provided through this multifaceted approach is critical for long-term impact.

Overall, the Graduation approach is grounded in the conviction that people living in vulnerable situations can be agents of change if they are empowered with the tools, skills, and hope they need to change their lives.

Perhaps with such people-centered efforts to scale an evidence-based approach, Rwanda could become known for more than its scenic beauty and clean capital city. It could also make history by becoming one of the first countries on the continent to establish a sustainable path out of extreme poverty by 2030.

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The African Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation will be hosted by Rwanda. It is part of the African Development Bank’s commitment to spend at least USD 3 billion over the next ten years to support Africa's pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturing sector. Medical and pharmaceutical experts pose for a group photo with their colleagues during the forum to introduce the newly launched African Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation last month in Kigali. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Jan 25 2023 (IPS)

A few months after German biotechnology company BioNTech announced the establishment of the first-ever local vaccine manufacturing in Rwanda, experts believe the successful implementation of such initiatives across the continent will require countries to acquire know-how while encouraging potential industrial partners in the pharmaceutical industry.

Experts emphasise the need to prioritise technology transfer to revamp Africa’s pharmaceutical industry with a key focus on vaccine manufacturing capacity and building quality healthcare infrastructure.

This is because, while pharmaceutical products are manufactured in countries such as South Africa, Kenya, Morocco and Egypt, the latest estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO) show that the continent currently imports more than 80 percent of its pharmaceutical and medical consumables.

During the forum, which took place recently in Kigali, experts elaborated on some challenges and current opportunities to boost the health prospects of a continent battered for decades by the burden of several diseases and pandemics such as COVID-19, with very limited capacity to produce its medicines and vaccines.

Participants at the forum, which focused mainly on operationalising the first-ever African Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation discussed how the African Union should achieve its target of having 60% of vaccines needed on the continent by 2040.

While the continent imports more than 70% of all the medicines it needs, gulping $14 billion annually, Dr Yvan Butera, Rwandan Minister of State in the Minister of Health, emphasised the need to mobilise additional financial resources for African countries that need them most to procure vaccine.

“The new initiative comes as a solution since most of [African] countries still face a challenge in receiving them on time,” the senior Rwandan Government official told the forum.

As current efforts to expand the manufacturing of essential pharmaceutical products, including vaccines, in developing countries, particularly in Africa, experts argue that concerted efforts to promote technology transfer are urgently needed. According to official estimates, Africa imports more than 70% of all the medicines it needs, gulping $14 billion annually.

Commenting on this situation, Professor Padmashree Gehi Sampath, Special Adviser to the President on Pharmaceuticals and Health, African Development Bank and Director of Global Access in Action, Harvard University, told delegates that technology transfer is critical, and the new initiative will help African countries to look at what are their technology needs.

“Most pharmaceutical companies in Africa are using different kinds of technology (…) it is important to boost their capacity, which has been hampered by intellectual property rights protection and patents on technologies, know-how, manufacturing processes and trade secrets,” the senior bank official told IPS.

Yet Africa’s public health challenges are well known; some experts believe that enhancing access to these technologies for pharmaceutical companies is critical to addressing numerous challenges facing the continent’s pharmaceutical industry.

According to Dr Hanan Balkhy, Deputy Director General World Health Organization (WHO), the continent faces many challenges before it can produce its medicines.

“Africa suffers from the repetitive occurrence of preventable diseases and epidemics, and the large part of medicines and vaccines to treat or prevent these diseases are imported from outside the continent,” Balkhy told delegates.

When fully established, the African Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation, which the bank has already approved, will be staffed with world-class experts on pharmaceutical innovation and development, intellectual property rights, and health policy.

The foundation also has the mandate as a transparent intermediator advancing and brokering the interests of the African pharmaceutical sector with global and other southern pharmaceutical companies to share IP-protected technologies, know-how and patented processes.

Dr Precious Matsoso, a co-chair of the international negotiating body of the WHO on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, stressed the importance of ensuring the African health system is resilient.

“Establishing the African Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation, by the bank, is a milestone to address these barriers we are facing, such as health equity,” she said.

Although the foundation is being established under the auspices of the African Development Bank, it will operate independently and raise funds from various stakeholders, including governments, development finance institutions, and philanthropic organisations.

Dr Richard Hatchett, Chief Executive Officer of the Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness Initiative (CEPI), told delegates that this foundation was initiated in timeously since Africa needs to learn from the lessons pandemic, which can be an important step to build resilience of its health system.

“These health care innovative solutions will help in saving lives on the continent,” he said.

So far, Rwanda has been selected to host the African Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation. A common benefits entity, the foundation will have its own governance and operational structures. It will also promote and broker alliances between foreign and African pharmaceutical companies.

However, some experts also emphasised the need to prioritise the African patent pharmaceutical industry to implement the new initiative successfully.

Professor Carlos Correa, Executive Director, South Centre, Geneva, pointed out that it was important for the region to have their own framework.

“Manufacturing capacity [in Africa] is there, but technology capacity is crucial to develop vaccines for Africa (….) Timely transfer of technology is also important,” he said.

During the forum, some panellists also stressed the need to establish a partnership between African pharmaceutical companies with their counterparts from other continents, such as Europe.

According to Brigit Pickel, Director General for Africa in the Germany Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, this partnership is important for vaccine manufacturing. It applies to the production and supply of other pharmaceutical products.

“We recognise the importance of promoting local pharmaceutical products across the value chain in Africa,” she said.

Apart from technology transfer, Professor Fredrick Abbott, Edward Ball Eminent Scholar Professor, Florida State University, USA, pointed out that this initiative cannot work without sustainable funding.

“Countries need to develop domestic resources because providing funding is a critical step to ensure the continuity of promising clinical development programs of vaccines and drugs,” Abbott told IPS.

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Female workers sort out plastic bottles for recycling in a factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. New initiatives were launched at the World Circular Economy Forum (WCEF) to reduce plastic pollution. Credit: Abir Abdullah/Climate Visuals Countdown

By Aimable Twahirwa
Kigali, Dec 13 2022 (IPS)

Experts agree that African economies need to develop innovative approaches to deal with plastic production, which is set to double in 20 years – adversely impacting rural communities.

They were speaking in Kigali, Rwanda, on the sidelines of the World Circular Economy Forum (WCEF).

As a result of current global efforts to spur Africa’s transition to a Circular Economy at the country, regional and continental levels, official estimates show that the transition to a fully circular economy could generate $4.5 trillion in economic benefits globally by 2030.

Government representatives, researchers, civil society activists, and strategic partners launched an initiative, the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastics Pollution, on the sidelines of WCEF to end plastic pollution by 2040.

“The issue of plastic pollution has reached crisis levels, and it is time polluters to be held to account,” Zaynab Sadan, the Regional Plastics Policy Coordinator for Africa at World Wildlife Fund (WWF), told IPS.

According to experts, the key to a circular economy in Africa is to eliminate open dumping and burning of waste on the continent and promote the use of waste as a resource for value and job creation.

The latest estimates by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) show that approximately 7 billion of the 9.2 billion tonnes of plastic produced from 1950-2017 globally has become plastic waste, ending in landfills or dumped.

Environmental experts argue that this pollution has altered habitats and natural processes and reduced ecosystems’ ability to adapt to climate change, affecting millions of people’s livelihoods, food production capabilities, and social well-being, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Experts unanimously agree that plastic consumption and production have reached unsustainable levels over the past 30 years, reaching 460 million tonnes between 2000 to 2019.

The 2022 Global Plastics Outlook report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) indicates that much of this growth is mostly driven by massive increases in the production of single-use plastics for packaging and consumer goods, which accounts for half of the plastic waste generation.

To address this growing phenomenon, Sadan insists on the need for African countries to integrate the informal sector into recycling and waste management.

“There is a pressing need to improvement in waste collection services and management at landfills,” the fierce conservation activist told delegates at the launching of the new High Ambition Coalition to end plastic pollution.

Official projections indicate that by 2060, the use of plastics could almost triple globally, driven by economic and population growth.

It said that plastic leakage to the environment is projected to double to 44 million tonnes (Mt) a year, while the build-up of plastics in aquatic environments will more than triple, where the largest costs are projected for Sub-Saharan Africa, whose GDP would be reduced by 2.8% below the baseline.

Kristin Hughes, the director of the resource circularity pillar and a member of the World Economic Forum’s executive committee, told delegates that if current trends continue, billion metric tons of plastic waste will be in landfills or the natural environment by 2050.

“Embedding science and evidence-based approach are key to end plastic pollution in Africa,” Hughes said.

From plastic waste to paving stones. This was a project highlighted at the World Circular Economy Forum in Kigali. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

During various sessions on the forum’s sidelines, Rwanda has been hailed as a role model in Africa toward managing waste from banning plastic bags in 2008, has made great steps forward, and has established the e-waste recycling facility in 2018.

Reacting to this achievement, Rwandan Minister of Environment Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya stressed the need for the country to strengthen existing mechanisms to have a carbon-neutral economy by 2050.

“Despite these achievements, there are still shortcomings that are exposing the country to severe impacts of improper waste management, including hazardous wastes,” Mujawamariya told delegates.

Terhi Lehtonen, Finnish Vice Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, is convinced that eradicating plastic pollution requires a systemic approach since plastic pollution is not simply a consumer issue.

“The plastic pollution is increasing at an alarming rate […] African countries need to adopt a holistic control strategy at both production and consumer level,” she told delegates.

The newly-established global mechanism, the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastics Pollution, is committed to developing ambitious international and legally binding instruments based on a comprehensive and circular approach that ensures urgent action and effective action interventions along the full lifecycle of plastics.

Erlend Haugen, Norway’s coordinator of the Global Initiative, said the new treaty must establish provisions for plastic waste minimization and environmentally sound collection, sorting, and preparation for reuse and recycling of plastic waste to re-enter recycled plastics into the economy and avoid leakage to the environment.

But activists are convinced that communities also have vital knowledge and experience that can help combat the scourge of plastic pollution.

“Countries should also adopt a gender-sensitive approach to tackle plastic pollution,” said Sadan.

According to her, the youth could also play a very influential role in plastic waste control by raising awareness about its negative impact.

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The Congo-Rwanda border bustles with traders going between the two countries but is also a conduit for criminal syndicates to smuggle elephant tusks and other contraband. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
RUBAVU, Northwestern Rwanda, Oct 21 2022 (IPS)

Every morning, Valerie Mukamazimpaka, a businesswoman selling various food products from Rubavu, a district in Northwestern Rwanda, wakes up early morning to cross “Petite Barrière,” one of the busiest border crossings with the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The mother of three takes advantage of the ‘Jeton,’ a daily authorization paper allowing individuals to move within the municipal limits of the border towns of Rubavu, Rwanda, and the frenetic city of Goma from North Kivu Province in the eastern part of DRC.

All day long, a constant stream of trade crisscrosses between the two countries, with people like Mukamazimpaka carrying bags of fruits, vegetables, and other products for business purposes on their backs or heads.

With over 55,000 legal crossings daily, “Petite Barrière” is described as the busiest land border between Rwanda and DR Congo under the strict supervision of law enforcement officers and customer agents whose duties primarily investigate and apprehend suspected smugglers.

“There are villagers around here who are sometimes forced to use porous entry points to avoid the risk of detection and apprehension because of moving smuggled goods such as ivory tusks mixed with other business commodities,” she told IPS.

In these remote villages across the transborder region, the modus operandi of ivory tusks smugglers is diverse. While some traffickers that smuggle ivory often deal in other illegal goods. Other highly sophisticated networks use social media platforms for advertising wildlife products online and finding buyers in their target market abroad.

While large-scale illegal wildlife crime is not prominent in Rwanda, conservation experts observe that Rwanda is a strategically relevant country in the illicit trade of wildlife products because it is nestled between several important sources, transit, and destination countries.

The use of social media has allowed smugglers of wildlife products to expand their network’s reach using Rwanda as a transit route, experts say.

According to Rwanda Wildlife Conservation Association, because the illegal wildlife trade, such as in ivory tusks, constantly evolves, the country needs law enforcement capacity building for police, customs, and judiciary personnel. It is also crucial that a national database for wildlife crime cases is set up and local communities are made aware of the penalties for wildlife crime.

Last year Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) arrested four people for allegedly trafficking products from endangered animals, such as elephant ivory.

According to Dr Thierry Murangira, RIB Spokesperson, the suspects were caught while using Rwanda as a transit country to smuggle 45 kilograms of ivory from the DRC to Asian countries.

The ring of smugglers had been using Facebook to connect with their accomplices who were still at large on the other side of the border. The case exposed that smuggling syndicates are now utilizing media platforms as an intermediate tool to connect buyers from Asia and buyers from DRC as the primary source market.

During a field investigation conducted on a freezing cold evening in Busasamana, a remote village from Rubavu, a district located at the border with the DRC, this reporter spotted residents who disguised themselves as farmers while waiting impatiently for potential customers looking to move goods using porous routes in their illegal cross-border trade to Rwanda.

A trader, who identified himself as Habanabakize, says his business is transporting goods on his wheelbarrow and moving smuggled goods to survive.

Investigations conducted by this reporter have demonstrated the role of social media platforms as a means for smugglers to connect and use locals to move ivory tusks across the border.

“People here are sometimes forced to take increasingly hazardous paths to cross the border because they are looking to make a living,” Habanabakize told IPS in an interview.

Online tools

Across these transborder areas, organized wildlife smuggling is severely threatening the survival of some of the most threatened species, including elephant ivory from Eastern DRC, where smugglers use technology to control their business remotely, according to the latest report by TRAFFIC, an international organization engaged in the fight against wildlife trade.

One of the investigations conducted by this reporter found that despite efforts by local administrative officials, customers, and border patrol agents in chasing smugglers, individuals engaged in this highly profitable illegal business use any online tools available to them.

But to move smugglers’ items to their destination, traffickers advertise wildlife products by messaging thousands of people through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp using anonymous accounts to control their illegal business using remote surveillance.

Aimable Twahirwa struck up a conversation with a smuggler during his investigation. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

This helps them connect with wildlife hunters and their informants on the other side of the border before engaging with potential customers through social media and chat rooms to sell elephant tusks, the typical commodity being illegally trafficked to consumers, particulars from parts of Asia.

Online payment methods

Most criminal syndicates rely on established methods such as placement and laundering of funds through formal financial institutions, which are undertaken through various online payment methods.

According to Rwanda’s National Public Prosecutor Authority (NPPA), money launderers, who play a significant role in the illegal wildlife trade, use smart techniques and utilize complex sequences of banking transfers or commercial transactions, which cannot be easily detected or traced.

Jean Bosco Murenzi, head of the Compliance and Prevention Department of Rwanda’s Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC), says that the cooperation and information exchange with Financial Intelligence Centres from other countries remains key to cracking down on such financial cheating where it is common to launder money through online and social media platforms.

With the establishment of the FIC in August 2020, financial institutions in the country can now submit suspicious transaction reports to the center, which also has the authority to exchange information with its peers from other countries.

Through this regional partnership, Rwanda and Kenya signed an agreement of cooperation in July this year, focusing on areas of information sharing about money laundering.

In many countries across the East African region, including Rwanda, conservation experts believe that the rise of e-commerce has made illegal wildlife trade online more hidden and more difficult to track and monitor.

East Africa’s judicial and procuratorial organs stepped up efforts in March to deepen their cross-border collaboration on ‘asset recovery’ – taking back the proceeds of wildlife crime and ending the money laundering that allows ill-gotten gains to be used for profitable investments. According to Paul Kadushi, Director, Asset Forfeiture, Transnational and Specialized Crimes Division, National Prosecutions Service of Tanzania, wildlife crime is leading to the proliferation of guns in the region.

During the investigation, the writer asked to join one of the Facebook buy/sell groups that focus on selling a wide array of items, with among products available for purchase sellers claimed were ivory.

After placing an order for ivory tusks on Facebook, the writer was prompted to a separate online form requesting him to fill in contact details, including phone number, and he was asked to pay with Mobile Money. The writer did not proceed.

Social media is the new medium that connects illegal elephant tusk traders with their markets. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

However, a few minutes later, the writer received a call from an anonymous number introducing himself as an agent from a registered company without elaborating on the name of the business and address location.

Criminal syndicates

Conservation experts believe that today’s trade of wildlife products across the East African region has shifted from physical markets to online marketplaces where traffickers apply e-commerce business models and use encrypted messages to evade detection by law enforcement.

“By their organization, they are very highly sophisticated criminal networks, and they are very difficult to detect, and a lot of it is being sold over the internet now,” said Dr Katherine Chase Snow, founder of Gaia Morgan group, a US-based non-profit conservation intelligence consultancy.

The latest report released by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) shows that the increased involvement of organized crime groups has changed the dynamics needed to address wildlife crime, especially across the East African region.

Reports show that the Internet has become a prime outlet to advertise and arrange sales, including of wildlife specimens, both legally and illegally.

A TRAFFIC report released in July 2020 indicated that 8,508 ivory items, from elephant tusks to jewelry and decorative items, were posted for sale on 1,559 Facebook and Instagram accounts in major countries across Asia in 2016.

According to Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB), most smugglers now use social media to find new ways to connect with potential customers and hide their real identities from the police.

Meantime, Interpol also says that traffickers take advantage of different social media platforms to advertise and sell wildlife and wildlife products online.

Gaining access to a vast international marketplace and following the same routes as other crimes such as drugs and weapons smuggling, wildlife trafficking is rising 5% to 7% annually, it said.

Online advertising 

Andrew McVey, climate advisor at World Wildlife Fund (WWF), stresses the need to have a greater public perception that wildlife crime is actually a serious and organized crime.

“Online advertising has been the main tactic used by wildlife traffickers, but still, Governments need to do more routine surveillance of the internet,” McVey said.

Fidele Ruzigandekwe, the Deputy Executive Secretary for Programs at the Rwandan-based Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration (GVTC), observes in an interview that current efforts to combat wildlife crime should not solely be linked to anti-poaching and law enforcement activities in each specific country across the region.

GVTC is an interstate collaboration toward sustainable conservation in the Virunga landscape, which stretches along the borders of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

“There is a need for transborder consultation between relevant organs within the partner states to crackdown illegal wildlife crimes that are now relying on sophisticated technologies,” Ruzigandekwe said.

Note: Earth Journalism Network provided support for this investigation.

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Ritta Achevih​ was barely able to feed her family, but now the Kenyan farmer has changed her fortunes by adopting Sustainable Land Management (SLM) approaches that improve soil health and productivity by protecting the soil from degradation. Credit. Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
Kigali, Sep 9 2022 (IPS)

For more than five years, Ritta Achevih was harvesting one bag of maize or less from her small plot each season. She could hardly provide enough healthy food for her big family.

The culprit for her growing poor maize yields was the exhausted soil on her one-hectare plot she continuously tilled on the edge of biodiversity-rich Kakamega Forest in northwestern Kenya. Farmers have cut down trees to make way for more land near the forest leading to massive land degradation.

But Achevih (65) from Vihiga Country has transformed her farming and harvested eight bags of maize last season. This is thanks to adopting the Sustainable Land Management (SLM) approaches that improve soil health and productivity by protecting the soil from degradation using manure. In addition, SLM promotes intercropping of maize and legumes and growing indigenous leafy vegetables.

“Changing how I managed my land has changed my yields. My livelihood has improved because I have enough and different types of food to eat,” Achevih told IPS on the sidelines of the Alliance for a Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) Summit in Kigali, Rwanda.

“I grow maize, beans, and indigenous vegetables which have helped my family to have enough healthy food. The indigenous vegetables have increased my family income because of the high yields,” said Achevih adding that she now enjoys varied meals daily.

“I have more food to choose from now than before. I can have bananas or millet porridge in the morning and ugali (maize dish) with indigenous vegetables for lunch and in the evening enjoy potatoes,” she quipped.

“My farming method is better, but farmers need training and support to produce more food, have more markets and earn better income.”

Achevih contributes to food security for her family and community. She could do better with access to improved technology, know-how, and inputs to boost food and nutrition security on the back of growing threats to agriculture in Africa.

Another farmer, Wellington Salano from Kakamega County, says the government needs to fulfill its commitments to agriculture development in Africa by investing more in the sector to help beat poverty, hunger, and malnutrition.

“African leaders should give a bigger portion of their budgets to agriculture because it is the source of our food and livelihoods, Salano told IPS. “Farming is life and cannot ensure healthy food without the investment to increase the production of farmers at a time we have to deal with climate change and shortage of food.”

Salano (65) grows maize, beans, and indigenous vegetables in Kakamega country in northwest Kenya. He practices sustainable land management and sustainable forest management under a project started by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) together with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO). The project seeks to enhance the sustainable management of the Kakamega Forest, which has been affected by deforestation due to illegal encroachment to harvest firewood, timber, and herbs and the conversion to pasture, leading to extreme biodiversity loss.

How to feed and nourish Africa?

How Africa can successfully navigate the crises currently affecting the global food supply chain and ensure that African Governments can mobilize investment and accelerate commitments to deliver a food-secure continent dominated discussions at the annual AGRF Summit.

Viable solutions are needed to boost sustainable crop production on the continent, where one in five people faced hunger in 2020. Worse, Africa remains a net food importer, spending nearly $50 billion on food imports.

“We should stop exporting these jobs when we can produce this food,” AGRA President Agnes Kalibata warned. “The current African food systems are failing to deliver healthy diets to all and are one of the greatest challenges for climate and environmental sustainability.”

Currently, about 57.9 percent of the people in Africa are under-nourished, according to the recent report, State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022, which also projects that hunger could increase, making Africa the region with the largest number of undernourished people.

Leadership for food and nutrition

In 2021, African leaders agreed on a common position ahead of the UN Food Systems Summit to ensure that Africa was more resilient to unexpected global shocks. However, the continent is off track to achieving agreed targets under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, the Malabo Declaration, and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Leaders noted that the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the global supply chain, and the energy crisis had strained Africa’s food systems.

“We need food systems transformation now,” said Hailemariam Desalegn, the former Prime Minister of Ethiopia and Chair of AGRA and the AGRF Partners Group, remarking that African leaders have committed to supporting food systems transformation, and collective action was needed to accelerate progress and real change.

“No country is healthy unless food and livelihoods are healthy,” noted Dessalegn calling on governments to prioritize and integrate policies that would promote healthy and nutritious diets, decent income for the farmers, and address climate and other challenges to food security.

“Africa’s prosperity depends on translating commitments we have made into implementation,” said Desalegn, underscoring that Africa’s plight requires collective will, voice, and action to transform the agriculture sector radically.

“There is a need to boldly galvanize collective will amongst leaders to emphatically support agricultural transformation.”

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Rural women are often targeted by human traffickers and taken across borders in Africa and forced to become sex workers. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Apr 29 2022 (IPS)

Desperate to escape the rural area where she was engaged in the informal economy in Kayonza, a district in Eastern Rwanda, Sharon* made a long and arduous journey to Kenya in the hope of a well-paid job.

An unidentified individual contacted her, paid for her ticket, and gave her a modest amount of pocket money to travel to Kenya by road. The person told the 19-year-old she was traveling to take up an “employment opportunity”.

However, Sharon found herself in sexual servitude at a karaoke bar on the outskirts of the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

Sharon’s job was to bow elegantly to all customers at the door and usher them inside the bar.

“I was also hired as a nightclub dancer and sometimes forced by my employer to engage in sexual intercourse with clients to earn a living,” the high school graduate told IPS in an interview.

Like Sharon, activists say the number of young women from rural areas trafficked into the sex trade across many East African countries is growing. The young women are lured with the promise of good jobs or marriage. Instead, they are sold into prostitution in cities such as Nairobi (Kenya) and Kampala (Uganda).

Both activists and lawmakers warn that people with hidden agendas could target young women from Rwanda.

The process of trafficking most of these young women into neighboring countries is complex. It involves false promises to their families and victims in which they are promised a “better life”, activists say.

In many cases, traffickers lure young women from rural villages to neighboring countries with the promise of well-paid work. Then, victims are transferred to people who become their enslavers – especially in dubious hotels and karaoke bars.

While Rwanda has tried to combat human trafficking, law enforcement agencies stress that the main challenge revolves around the financial and other assistance for repatriated victims. Limited budgets of the institutions in charge of investigation and rehabilitation of the victims have meant that these programmes are not working optimally.

The chairperson of the East African Legislative Assembly’s Committee on Regional Affairs and Conflict Resolution, Fatuma Ndangiza, warned that if no urgent measures are undertaken, the problem is likely to worsen.

“Most of these young women without employment were victims of a well-established human trafficking ring operating under the guise of employment agencies in the region,” Ndangiza told IPS.

The latest figures by Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) indicate that 119 cases of human trafficking, illegal migration, and smuggling of migrants in the region were investigated in the last three years.

These involved 215 victims, among whom 165 were females and 59 males.

Driven by the demand for cheap labor and commercial sex, trafficking rings across the East African region capitalize primarily on economic and social vulnerabilities to exploit their victims, experts said.

But estimates by the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM)  show that the lack of relevant legislation and needed administrative institutions across the East African region have continued to give traffickers and smugglers an undue advantage to carry on their activities.

To prevent human trafficking, Rwanda has adopted several measures, including passing a new law in 2018.

Under the current legislation, offenders face up to 15 years of imprisonment, but activists say this measure is not enough deterrent.

Although law enforcement officers were trained in combatting human trafficking, Evariste Murwanashyaka, a  fervent defender of human rights who is based in Kigali, told  IPS that enforcing laws is a challenge, mainly because it is hard to detect women who are engaged in sex work or other forms of sexual exploitation in neighboring countries.

Murwanashyaka is the Program Manager of Rwandan based Umbrella of Human Rights Organization known as ‘Collectif des Ligues et Associations de Défense des Droits de l’Homme’ (CLADHO)

“Young women are still more likely to become targets of trafficking due to the growing demand for sexual slavery across the region, ” he said.

Now with the COVID-19 pandemic, activists say there is not only a lack of awareness but people, especially youth, who are unaware they are victims of a human trafficking offense.

“Most informal job offers from abroad for these young people [from Rwanda] are  associated with illicit businesses, such as human trafficking, mainly of women, and their sexual and labor exploitation,” Murwanashyaka told IPS

According to the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, the increasing unemployment rates, malnourishment, and school closures have increased human trafficking.

Meanwhile, RIB spokesperson, Dr Thierry Murangira is convinced that human trafficking is a transnational organized crime.

“Transnational organized crimes require the involvement of more than one jurisdiction and regional cooperation to investigate and prosecute the crime,” he said.

This article is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.
The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7, which “takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labor, end modern slavery and human trafficking, and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labor, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labor in all its forms”.
The origins of the GSN come from the endeavors of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such as exploitation, forced labor, prostitution, human trafficking”.

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Desperate for work Kamikazi put her faith in ‘agents’ to find her a job. Instead, she found herself working without pay as a domestic worker in Kuwait. Photo: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Rwanda, Jan 5 2022 (IPS)

When Kamikazi * from Gisagara, a district in Southern Rwanda, was forced to quit her job due to COVID-19 last year, she desperately sought other employment.

A former co-worker in the food processing firm where Kamikazi once worked introduced her to “agents”. They assured her she would find decent employment in the Middle East, but little did she know her co-worker had delivered her into the arms of human traffickers.

The following day, with her passport in hand, the 22-year-old approached the agent, who told her to pay about 300 US dollars as a facilitation fee.

“One day, I received a call from the agent who told me that I had to travel to Kenya where I would secure my visa to Kuwait,” Kamikazi told IPS.

At the border between Tanzania and Kenya, the young woman met other members of the human trafficking syndicate who helped her to cross into Kenya unnoticed before travelling by road to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.

In Nairobi, she and the ‘agents’ hid residential house with several other young women of different African nationalities. Driven by fear and desperation, she continued with the ruse until the group finally boarded a plane to Kuwait.

“I was told that domestic workers from our region (East Africa) were more highly valued in Kuwait than those from other countries,” she says.

Kamikazi recalls her arrival. The traffickers took their passports and held her and some other young women prisoner in an apartment.

“We believed them because my hope was that the new opportunity would help change my life for the better,” she told IPS.

However, her hopes for a better future were soon dashed.

She was “hired’ by a family – but found herself locked up and unpaid. And if it suited them, her employers would swap the domestic workers between themselves.

“I didn’t have any valid travel document, and I was treated like an animal being traded by one family to another,” she said. To make matters worse, she realised that her ex-colleague, whom she considered a close friend, was responsible for her situation.

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), in most countries in the Middle East, domestic workers are excluded from labour law, which means they have no social, health or legal protection.

Domestic workers suffer from particularly arduous conditions, and their situation is all the more vulnerable because most countries have no laws governing their employment, the report said. Because they are excluded from labour law provisions, written employment contracts are not required.

Victims of human traffickers often become sexually exploited, forced into labour, slavery and can become victims of organ removal and sale.

Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) has warned that thousands of people fall prey to traffickers who portray themselves as recruitment agents. Vulnerable young women seeking greener pastures fall prey to these traffickers.

Latest estimates by UN Women indicate that while it’s challenging to get exact numbers of victims, the vast majority of detected trafficking victims are women and girls, and three out of four are trafficked for sexual exploitation.

Recent cases of maids being mistreated and assaulted by their employers in the Middle East have shone a light on domestic workers’ hidden and unregulated conditions.

In many cases, these women work illegally, which means they have little protection if their employers abuse them.

With tears in her eyes, Kamikazi remembers her first hours with her new employee.

“After confiscating my passport, I was told to stay at home (…) I was like in a cage,” Kamikazi said.

A typical working day started as early as 4 am and ended at midnight or later. There were no days off, and there was no going out unless to accompany the family somewhere.

“I had to take care of the house pets in addition to cooking, cleaning, washing clothes (…) I wanted to escape because I was abused by my employer but had no idea where to turn,” she said.

Whereas Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) findings indicate that the majority of the victims are intercepted at the point of exit – either at the airport or the different border points of the country – evidence shows there are cases where young women are trafficked to neighbouring countries as a transit for commercial sexual exploitation in the Gulf countries.

An investigation by law enforcement institutions in Rwanda found at least 47 local-based syndicate members were trafficking women from Rwanda to work abroad. As a result, 49 individuals, including company owners, were arrested and prosecuted in courts of law in 2018, according to judicial reports.

The trend shows an upward trajectory, with 131 trafficking victims identified in 2020, compared with 96 victims in 2019.

Like Kamikazi, most human trafficking victims are enticed from villages and towns with false promises of gainful employment abroad.

Studies have proven that when families are economically unstable, the vulnerability of children increases. Traffickers prey on such families by making false promises of a new job, augmented income, better living conditions and financial support abroad.

Even though Rwanda has a strict anti-trafficking law that penalises sex and labour trafficking with up to 15 years of imprisonment, the RIB Secretary-General, Jeannot Ruhunga, is convinced that trafficking, especially women and children, continues to be a serious challenge faced by the international community.

Speaking during the workshop ‘Law enforcement officers & Criminal Justice practitioners’ workshop under the theme: Combating Trafficking in Human Beings with a Multi-stakeholders’ approach for Central and East Africa, the senior Rwandan police investigator noted that organised trafficking in persons is transboundary. It’s a global problem but seriously affects Central and East Africa.

“The most important is about how countries work together to address challenges encountered during the investigation and prosecution of this transboundary offence and to strengthen cooperation and mutual assistance,” Ruhunga said.

According to data from the Rwanda Directorate General of Immigration and Emigration, the majority of suspected human trafficking victims identified in Rwanda were from Burundi (62.7%), followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (15%) and Rwanda (13.6%).

Case data by the National Public Prosecution Authority reveal between 2016 and 2018, most perpetrators were male (63%), with females still comprising a substantial percentage of traffickers (37%).

The 2019 study conducted by Rwandan NGO Never Again Rwanda stresses that the effective management of national borders constitutes a critical component of inhibiting human trafficking because it functions to deter criminals and identify victims.

The research found that the primary transit countries for trafficking in East Africa are Uganda, Kenya, and, to a lesser extent, Tanzania. Uganda ranks first, followed by Kenya and Tanzania as destinations for trafficking.

Dr Joseph Ryarasa Nkurunziza, Executive Director of Never Again Rwanda, told IPS that awareness and education are key to beating human trafficking in Rwanda.

“Awareness is important considering that the pandemic has worsened the situation for many vulnerable groups which are now more prone to human trafficking,” Nkurunziza said.

For Kamikazi, her ordeal has come to an end. After being forced to work night and day and kept prisoner in her employer’s home, she was rescued after asking assistance from a businesswoman in Kuwait.

Her rescuer contacted the Rwandan Embassy in Dubai.

“It seemed like my employer didn’t want to give back my passport, but the Kuwait Police told them to give it to me.”

*Kamikazi’s name has been changed to protect her identity.

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN )  is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms.
The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such as exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking”.

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Rwanda has introduced mobile dryer machines as part of an innovative solution to reduce post-harvest losses of food Credit: Aimable Twahirwa

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Rwanda, Jul 22 2021 (IPS)

Rwanda is trying to reduce post-harvest loss by relying on new technologies to increase the amount of food available for consumption and help smallholder farmers confront some challenges caused by the overproduction of staple crops.

For over 20 years, Cyriaque Sembagare, a maize grower from Kinigi, a mountainous village in Northern Rwanda, had survived on farming to feed his extended family but struggled with the loss of a significant portion of his harvest to rot. High levels of aflatoxin prevent farmers in remote rural Rwanda from selling maize to high-value buyers.

“I have been selling maize on the market, but I was given a low price because of the harvests highly perishable nature,” the 56-year-old farmer told IPS in an interview.

Post-harvest losses are high in Rwanda, with smallholder farmers losing an average of 27.5 percent of their production annually.

A comparison with the global and African scenarios indicates that Rwanda does well on preventing food loss and wastage (72.5 percent). The country is slightly lagging on average in sustainable agriculture (71 percent). It is among the lowest performers while tackling nutritional challenges (71.2 percent), according to the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition (BCFN) sustainability index.

To boost resilience and reduce post-harvest losses, the government and different development partners have supported thousands of farmers facing several barriers, ranging from a lack of knowledge to poor market access.

The initiatives include innovative solutions in post-harvest handling to improve food security in this East African country. The country is ranked 59th among 67 countries on the latest Food Sustainability Index (FSI), developed by The Economist Intelligence Unit with BCFN.

While Rwanda is ranked on top among nine low-income countries, especially in Sub-Saharan African, the country is lagging in addressing food waste.

FSI research by the Economist Intelligence Unit, based on data from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), indicates that in terms of annual food waste per head, Mozambique comes on top of African countries with 1.2kg, followed by Rwanda (1kg).

This high level of waste has prompted the government and partners to promote modern technologies to tackle post-harvest losses, including two types of dryer machines: Mobile grain dryer machines and Cob Dryer machines that tested successfully on maize, rice and soybean.

“The aim was to reduce the risk of crop degradation or contamination by different fungi which occurred when dried naturally and affects the availability of food,” Illuminée Kamaraba, the Division Manager in Post-Harvest Management and Biotechnology at Rwanda Agriculture Board, told IPS.

During the implementation phase, Rwandan researchers had embarked on testing Cob dryer machines on other crops like Roselle (Hibiscus). Some 400kg were dried before samples were taken to the laboratory to verify if the nutrients remained intact. This method focuses on limiting the harvests’ exposure to aflatoxin.

Before expanding the technology countrywide, a study to measure the impact of these innovations, especially the use of dryer machines, is planned for testing this year.

“The new technologies are complementary with some traditional methods for food preservation,” Kamaraba said.

Currently, Rwanda has acquired ten mobile dryer machines for the pilot phase to process 57 to 84 tons of well-dried and cooled cereals per day.

The mobile grain dryers mostly use electricity but could be connected to tractors to run on its diesel-powered burner where there is no electricity supply system.

For the cob dryer machine, its burner and fan depend on the supply of three-phase electricity and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) gas, while the cob container (the wagon) is a tractor-drawn vehicle.

According to official projections, the new technology, promoted through private and public partnerships (PPP), aims to help Rwanda achieve 5 percent of post-harvest losses by 2024 – down from the current 22 percent for cereals and 11 percent for beans.

Jean de Dieu Umutoni, one of the experts from Feed the Future Rwanda, Hinga Weze, a non-government organisation working to increase the resilience of agriculture and food systems to the ever-changing climate in Rwanda, told IPS that the idea behind this innovation was to increase access to post-harvest equipment and solutions

“This has been conducted through different channels such as grants, especially for smallholders’ farmers,” he said.

Both Umutoni and Kamaraba are convinced that for Rwanda to implement the public-private partnerships to reduce post-harvest losses, gaps in knowledge of smallholder farmers, especially in remote rural areas, need to be filled.

So far, Hinga Weze and Rwanda Agricultural Board (RAB) have worked together in developing some guidelines that allow the private sector to use the new technologies. Experts say, however, that the biggest challenge for farmers is that they lack information on how to access suppliers. In contrast, the suppliers lack information on the growers that need the equipment.

Umutoni says that while public-private partnerships could introduce good practices, the government needs to support the technological innovations for them to be scaled up.

“There is a good start with on use of mobile dryers to address food waste reduction, but the private sector needs to be engaged in other crop value chains,” Umutoni told IPS.

While it is the task of the government to initiate solutions, experts argue that the private sector has a role to play in ensuring the technology is sustainable.

One such example is Hinga Weze’s ‘Cob Model’. This project has enabled a private sector operator to assist farmers by using the first sizeable mobile drying machine in Rwanda. It has a capacity for drying 35 metric tons within three hours or about 100 tons per day. The NGO developed guidelines with the Rwandan government for the machine’s use.

Already, there is some indication that these technologies will be successful.

Farmers, like Sembagare, are satisfied.

“Thanks to the adoption of smart post-harvest technologies, I was able to save half the crop that would otherwise have been lost,” Sembagare told IPS.

Rwanda may be a small country of some 12 million people, but its membership in the East African Community provides it with a market of some 100 million. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE , Jun 17 2020 (IPS)

In its effort to accelerate Rwanda’s green growth development initiative, its local businesses encouraged their Italian counterparts to invest in the East Africa region.

In a virtual discussion, the director of operations at the Private Sector Federation (PSF) of Rwanda, Yosam Kiiza, said Rwanda’s strength lies with its membership with the East African Community (EAC). The EAC is composed of five countries and has a population of over 100 million people.

“This means that investing in Rwanda is an opportunity to export to the rest of the other member countries as well as the Great Lakes Region,” he said.

Rwanda also shares a border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) whose population is 80 million. Although the DRC is not yet a member of the EAC, it provides a vast market for its smaller neighbour, Rwanda, which has a population of 12 million.

Two webinars, organised by the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) in partnership with Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA) as part of an agreement between the Italian and Rwandan ministries of environment, were held this month. The online discussions were aimed at facilitating green technology transfer and creating partnerships between companies from Italy and Rwanda.

Kiiza was speaking during the Jun. 10 webinar that targeted major stakeholders, such as institutions, entrepreneurs, investors, developers etc., who have a key role in the green growth and sustainable development of their country’s economy in both Italy and Rwanda.

Through its transformation to low carbon development and green growth, Rwanda is a minefield of opportunities. The first webinar was held on Jun. 03.

In the virtual discussion, REMA Deputy Director-General Faustin Munyazikwiye urged business people to embrace green investment to help the country meet its climate action plan and achieve its Vision 2050 — Rwanda’s growth plan to achieve high-income status.

Meanwhile, Kiiza said the PSF is keen on investments that will deliver green growth solutions primarily in public health, air quality, and environmental restoration as well as creating sustainable jobs in tourism, transport, agriculture and manufacturing.

“The Italian business community is ready for the challenge,” the President of the Small Industry of Assolombarda, Alessandro Enginoli, said. A study tour of 30 Italian companies – he continued — was planned for March. The tour, organised in cooperation with GGGI and the Italian Trade Agency, was cancelled because of travel bans implemented by both governments to curb the spread of COVID-19. However, said Enginoli, “I’m confident we can do it again as soon as possible, probably in October.”

He said the dialogue between the two federations, Assolombarda and PSF, started a year ago when he first visited Rwanda. Assolombarda is the regional private sector association from Lombardia Region and a member of the National Private Sector Federation, Confidustria. It is the largest industrial association in Italy, representing 7,500 companies. The Small Industries represents 4,500 companies with a turnover of about €32 billion.

“Italy is known for its high concentration of small and medium companies,” he said, adding: “This model is perfect for African needs. The Italian business model is a win-win model that creates local development and job creation.”

Absolute Energy, an independent investment platform focused on renewable energy, is already pursuing a path of affordable energy in Rwanda. According to Absolute Energy chief executive officer, Alberto Pisanti, energy is a means to development. He said considering that agriculture is more developed compared to other countries, closing the gap between the sector, water and energy is the way to go.

Pisanti highlighted the gaps in agriculture such as the fact that 70 percent of farm work in Africa is done manually, 90 percent has no artificial irrigation and that the continent has 50 percent of global uncultivated arable land and imports 66 percent of the food it consumes.

“There’s a lot to do. Clearly you need machinery, transformation, reduce waste and work as much as possible locally to avoid people migrating to the cities thus abandoning rural areas,” said Pisanti.

He said it was for that reason that his company believes in rural electrification and decentralized generation is key especially in countries like Rwanda. But there are challenges, he said, adding that doing a business in a village that is too small may not be viable.

Also sharing his experiences of running a business in Rwanda was Giovanni Davite, co-owner and executive director of Kipharma, a business started by his father in 1969. It now has a turnover of €12 million. He described Rwanda as a stable yet fast-growing country whose leadership has a strong vision. He warned though that it requires patience.

“If you’re in business to do a quick buck, Rwanda is not for you,” he said.

Other industries that made presentations include agriculture, ecotourism, wood, construction and textile. Representations were also made by by Daniele Kihlgren, President of Group Sextantio-DOM, which focuses on sustainable tourism and Vicky Murabukirwa, a senior partner from construction company Duval Great Lakes Ltd.

Diane Mukasahaha, the chairperson for the Apparel Manufacturing Group (AMG), said she was grateful that the Government of Rwanda banned the import of second-hand clothing because this has created an opportunity for the local industry. She said this industry creates a lot of jobs.

“In just one year, AMG created 500 jobs,” she said.

Italian Ambassador to Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, Massimiliano Mazzanti, was pleased that the Embassy was involved in this initiative and encouraged entrepreneurs who want to start their business in Rwanda to avail themselves of the support of the Italian Embassy.

According to Claudia Beretta, who works on a project that is focusing on private sector engagement with GGGI, the Government of Rwanda does not leave out the word ‘green’ when talking about development. Responding to a question from IPS, Beretta said the airport is a good example of linking development to sustainability.

“It’s the biggest infrastructure project and the objective of the government is to have the greenest airport in Africa,” she said.

She said GGGI, an international organisation that assists countries develop inclusive and sustainable economic growth, is working closely with the government to make this vision a reality.  Beretta added that other opportunities exist in the renewable energy sector which can contribute towards reducing post-harvest losses. She said rural electrification through renewable energy could help farmers with refrigeration systems that would keep produce fresh until it reaches the market.

“The majority of the population is using charcoal and wood to cook and this is a big problem for the environment and health of the population. The government is working towards supporting new technologies and alternative fuels such as LPG,” she said.

Beretta noted that this is a challenge considering that buying power for rural communities is low although this could be overcome through business models that offer affordable energy.

Emmanuel Nsabimana, a casual labourer at the National Tree Seed Centre, in Huye, in Rwanda’s Southern Province, has worked planting trees for over 40 years. He believes there has been considerable improvements in the seed quality from the centre since the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) became one of the contributors to its restoration. Credit: Emmanuel Hitimana/IPS

By Emmanuel Hitimana
HUYE, Rwanda, May 20 2020 (IPS)

In 2011, when Rwanda committed to restoring 2 million hectares of land in a global effort to restore 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested areas by 2020 — it seemed like a big ask. 

The densely populated and geographically small African nation had many limitations which could stand in the way of this as well as a commitment to achieving forest cover increase of up to 30 percent of total land area by 2030 as part of the Bonn Challenge.

Aside from limited land availability — Rwanda’s land area only encompasses 2.4 million hectares or 24,000 square kilometres — the country’s terrain did little to support the efforts. The country’s topography includes steep slopes, and it is the country with the highest mean soil erosion rate, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

There were other factors too:

• A majority of the population — some 98 percent — were using trees as an energy source and the situation was not expected to change soon;
• 70 percent of the land was used by smallholder farmers, and the diversity of tree species was also low, with limited quality seed available. 

But by 2018, Rwanda, along with South Korea, Costa Rica, Pakistan and China, was considered one of the lead countries in the world with its successful restoration programme.

How did the country manage to restore more than 800,000 hectares — almost half of its original pledge — in less than a decade? 

Part of the answer lies in the restructuring and strengthening of the country’s National Tree Seed Centre, located in Huye, in Rwanda’s Southern Province, some 133 kilometres from the country’s capital.

The centre is tasked with centralising the supply of tree seeds across the country, including establishing new seed sources, improving trees with growth deficiencies, and collecting and certifying seed.

Until 2014, the Rwanda Agriculture and Animal Resources Development Board (RAB) managed the centre. But farmers complained that they were unable to grow plants from almost 90 percent of the seeds from the centre.

Emmanuel Nsabimana, a casual labourer at the National Tree Seed Centre, has worked planting trees around Huye for over 40 years.

He remembers the attitude of local farmers and communities.

“Farmers were always bitter towards the centre because they thought that it was incapable of providing them with adequate seeds,” he recalls.

“Many would return the seeds.”

But in 2014 the centre shifted from RAB to become a unit of the Rwanda Forestry Agency. In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) — one of the founders and Secretariat of the Bonn Challenge, along with the German Government — stepped in to become one of the most significant contributors to the restoration of Rwanda’s National Tree Seed Centre.   

IUCN also partnered with the Rwandan Government, the Belgian Development Agency (ENABEL) and the University of Rwanda (UR) to strengthen the centre.

IUCN supported capacity building, including the training of staff, providing equipment to the centre, upgrading and developing infrastructure like greenhouses, maintenance of the seed stands where seeds are collected form, and rehabilitation of seed store where seeds are kept before they are distributed, Jean Pierre Maniriho, Forest Landscape Restoration Officer at IUCN, tells IPS.

“Before partners came in, many things were not going well. For example, we did not have a cold room, which was bad for seeds. We were only two staff, and the stock was also old. But we have steadily improved until now,” Floribert Manayabagabo, the production officer at the National Tree Seed Centre, says. His job is to make sure the seeds harvested at the centre are ready for market.

Manayabagabo thinks that the centre’s success story is thanks to a combination of great partnerships that ensured the centre now has good infrastructure that includes nurseries, a laboratory, a modern cold room and five full-time staff.

Maniriho says seed quality and quantity are essential to ensure sustainability and to meet demand.

Currently, 30 percent of the seeds come from the nearby 90-year-old, 200-hectare Arboretum of Ruhande, which surrounds the University of Rwanda.

The seeds from the arboretum include 207 exotic and indigenous species, explains Emmanuel Niyigena, a field officer at the centre. 

The remaining 70 percent come from the outside of the centre, with a significant amount of seeds sourced from nine agro forestry-related cooperatives within Rwanda, and the remaining seed being imported from Kenya.

One of many nurseries at Rwanda’s National Tree Seed Centre. The centre is tasked with centralising the supply of tree seeds across the country, including establishing new seed sources, improving trees with growth deficiencies, and collecting and certifying seed. Credit: Emmanuel Hitimana/IPS

It’s Eric Kazubwenge’s job to make sure that the seeds from the centre never disappoint. He is in charge of seed inspection and regulation at the centre.

“We normally do a physical inspection to make sure that they are not damaged. Then we proceed with laboratory testing before we conduct other testing in the nursery where seeds are conserved to make sure they will not resist soil plantation.”

He adds that multiple tests are continually carried out to ascertain how long a seed can grow in a nursery or how much moisture they need to survive.

Kazubwenge learnt many of these skills in Kenya, where he was trained through an IUCN partnership.

While Kazubwenge’s training was highly technical, members of cooperatives involved in seed supply chain also received training.

Kazubwenge tells IPS that previously it was very difficult for the cooperatives to supply to the centre the good seeds as they couldn’t distinguish good from bad quality seeds. The Tree Seed Centre was also unable to test and prove the quality of seeds due to lack of equipment (seed laboratory was not well equipped). This combination of limitations meant only a handful of seeds provided to the forest growers before 2014 had been fruitful.

“Our stock is (now) full of good seeds in terms of quality and quantity, thanks to cooperatives that were trained in seed collection and selection through IUCN partnership,” Janviere Muhayimana, who is in charge of the seed stock, tells IPS.

The centre also ensures farmers and the community are given the necessary information about the planting of the improved seeds.

Nsabimana concurs: “There are no more complaints (from farmers) as the seeds respond well to the soil.”

The researchers are optimistic about the future.

Kazubwenge’s vision for the centre’s future involves advanced technologies that will allow him to “carry out genetic assessment and analysis because it gives us deep knowledge about the compatibility of seeds according to their origins”.

Maniriho sees Rwanda on a good path to become a regional seed hub.

“Deforestation is a global challenge. What we have in Rwanda is what exactly is happening in Burundi or Malawi. We are importing seeds from Kenya today, but tomorrow others may be importing from us. We can make those connections that can encourage and strengthen the reciprocal partnership in seed supply and keep us from sending money overseas to only import seeds that we are sometimes capable of producing.”

Rwanda’s successful steps towards meeting its reforestation pledge proves a powerful example of how nature conservation can support livelihoods ahead of the IUCN World Conservation Congress, which will be held in France in January 2021. Held every four years, the Congress is a meeting of conservation experts and custodians, government and business representatives, indigenous peoples, scientists, as well as other professional stakeholders, who have an interest in nature and the sustainable and just use of natural resources. One of the major issues addressed will be the managing of landscapes for nature and people.

** Writing with Nalisha Adams in Bonn.

Excerpt:

Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, is the country’s largest city. However, the country hopes to soon implement the first stage of a new dynamic plan for the development of six climate-resilient secondary cities. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Emmanuel Hitimana
KIGALI, Jul 15 2019 (IPS)

How do you plan a resilient city? A city that can withstand climate change impacts, and the natural disasters that it produces at increased frequencies. And how do you protect the city, its individuals and communities, its business and institutions from either the increased flooding or prolonged droughts that result? It’s a complex question with an even more complex solution, but one that the central African nation of Rwanda is looking to answer.

“Urban resilience means preventing disasters, and planning ahead in order to cope with them in an efficient way,” says Rwanda’s National Roadmap for Green Secondary Cities Development.

The roadmap, which was developed by the government with assistance from the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) in 2016, provides guidance for the development of six climate resilient secondary cities in the country. It also outlines how they can grow sustainably while also contributing to Rwanda’s national urbanisation strategy, which according to the roadmap is to “achieve 35 percent urbanisation by 2020 for each of the secondary cities”.

Environmentalists convened in Kigali to discuss the integration of green growth in Rwanda’s satellite cities. Credit: Emmanuel Hitimana/IPS

What is a green city?

Rwanda, along with its development partners, hopes to soon implement the first stage of the dynamic plan that will kick off in Nyagatare, a district that borders Uganda in the northeast. On Thursday, Jul. 11, environmentalists, private sector stakeholders and government officials convened for a workshop in Kigali to discuss the integration of green growth in Rwanda’s secondary cities. 

While large cities are often known for waste, pollution and bad urban planning, Nyagatare will be a far cry from this. Nyagatare will be a green city not only because of the lush, hilly landscape in which it sits, but because the city itself will be built along the lines of a green economy. It will be net zero carbon (by 2050), resource and waste efficient and have a green economy, which aims to offer high quality employment to its residents.

Also key is improved water efficiency—which includes installing water efficient plumbing fixtures, rainwater harvesting systems, wastewater treatment in buildings, and the reuse of treated wastewater for flushing and other secondary applications etc.—green public spaces, green transport modes and buildings constructed from eco-friendly products.

Nyagatare will be the first of six districts to be developed under the “Readiness and preparatory support to implement Green City Development Projects in Rwanda’s Secondary Cities”, which operationalises the national roadmap and which is being implemented by the government, and the Rwanda Environmental Management Authority (REMA) in partnership with GGGI.

The establishment of the secondary cities is a key part of Rwanda’s priority to tackling climate change. Rwanda was awarded 600,000 dollars by Green Climate Fund (GCF) for the project, which will not only protect the environment but will consolidate the land use in the six districts, according to Jean Pierre Munyeshyaka, the senior associate for Green Urbanisation at GGGI Rwanda.

“The chosen cities were part of districts that showed signs of development but they were not ready for green growth. That is why we did this project and submitted this project to GCF to help them build conscious-driven green development,” Munyeshyaka told IPS.

All districts have been strategically chosen because of their population size, geographic location and contribution to the country’s economy. The other districts are Muhanga, which is close to Kigali; Huye, which is considered the country’s knowledge centre and is home to the National University of Rwanda and the National Institute of Scientific Research; Musanze and Rubavu, which are tourist destinations and close to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda respectively; and Rusizi district, which borders the southern DRC and is the location of one of the country’s three major lake ports.

Munyeshyaka explained that the secondary cities will be run on renewable energy and be built to ensure low carbon emissions. There will also be easy-to-use public roads and transport, easy access to markets and health centres. He explained that when more people spent less money to travel to hospitals or markets, it meant they could save more and use their money for other things, such as business development etc.

Rapid economic and urban growth

The hilly, fertile, and relatively non-resource rich nation of Rwanda has made great strides in economic growth over the last decade, its 8.6 percent growth in 2018 was listed as the highest on the continent, according to the World Bank.

But it is also one of the most densely-populated countries on the continent with almost 12.2 million people living in a nation the size of the U.S. state of Maryland. That’s approximately 445 people per square kilometre, according to Rwanda’s 4th Population and Housing Census Projection.

And while Rwanda has been called one of the “least urbanised” countries on the continent, with only 18 percent of its population living in cities, its urban population growth rate “is 4.5 percent, which is well above the world average of 1.8 percent”, according to the roadmap.

“Rwanda, although predominantly rural, has been urbanising rapidly, from a half-million urban residents in 1995 to more than three and a half million today,” according to Ilija Gubic, a senior urbanisation and infrastructure officer with GGGI in Rwanda and Dheeraj Arrabothu, a GGGI green building officer who helps the Rwanda Housing Authority (RHA) promote green urbanisation in Rwanda.

Faustin Munyazikwiye, the deputy Director General of Environment Management Authority, said all sustainable development projects in the country need to be considered with a green economy in mind. Credit: Emmanuel Hitimana/IPS

No growth without green growth

Faustin Munyazikwiye, the deputy Director General of REMA, the national designated authority mandated to facilitate coordination and oversight of the implementation of the national environmental policy and the subsequent legislation, said any sustainable development project in the country needs to think in terms of a green economy.

“We have seen and we are aware that our country is under immense risk when it comes to climate change. For that matter, we have identified six cities to start with readiness and preparation. We will equip them with necessary infrastructures that will resist any harm to climate change,” Munyazikwiye told IPS.

According to a USAID climate change risk profile on Rwanda “rising temperatures, more frequent and intense heavy rains, and potentially increased duration of dry spells threaten Rwandan agriculture”. Some 70 percent of Rwandans are employed in the agriculture sector, which accounts for 50 percent of the country’s export revenue.

Munyazikwiye was speaking during the Jul. 11 workshop on implementing green growth strategies of the Nyagatare master plan.

During the workshop, staff from various government and private entities were trained on how to include green growth and climate resilience in project concepts and taught how to engage with the GCF for climate finance and green investment opportunities in Rwanda.

Green growth success dependent on private sector partners

“Private sector is absolutely the key. At the end of the day there is limited public funds in the world. It is actually the private [sector] that has to step in to help reach climate change goals and [get] implementation process running, ” Inhee Chung, Rwanda Country Director for GGGI, told IPS.

She explained that aside from getting the private sector on board with the concept of a green economy and getting it to invest in eco-friendly products like building materials and other innovations that will be used during the development of the secondary green cities, GGGI have also been focusing on integrating the community to help them understand the shared vision.

“For us green growth does not just mean only the environment. It actually means growth with the people. Environment, people and economy, they are all interlinked because if one is excluded  sustainability isn’t really achieved, this is why we make every step inclusive,” she said.

Much of the area earmarked in Nyagatare district for the secondary city is inhabited by middle income families.

Parfait Karekezi, the Green and Smart Cities Specialist at the RHA, the agency responsible for urbanisation, whose mandate includes responsibility for settlements and building construction, who was also speaking during a panel discussion at the workshop, was asked if the national roadmap and the master plan established the required enabling environment for green growth.

“RHA  is a championing entity in urban and housing development, its role in the process is to synergise and bring together different stakeholders and create a more coordinated and consolidated framework. Therefore, through the National Advisory Committee, effective strategies and ideas are discussed, reviewed and delivered,” he said, adding that the RHA also plays a key role in engaging local stakeholders and communities in the process.

Sally Murray, a country economist at the International Growth Centre, is optimistic about the future of Rwanda’s urbanisation.

“Rwanda has an opportunity that may be unique in Africa – to harness urbanisation to its full potential,” Murray states in a paper on urbanisation and economic growth in the country.

And it seems that Rwanda is on its way to doing just that.

Frank Rijsberman Director-General, Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) speaking in Kigali, at a week-long Africa Green Growth Forum 2018 to discuss how to foster green growth. Credit: Emmanuel Hitimana/IPS

By Emmanuel Hitimana
KIGALI, Nov 30 2018 (IPS)

Over 1000 policy makers, experts, investors and financial specialists from across Africa are gathered this week in Kigali, at a week-long Africa Green Growth Forum 2018 to discuss how to foster green, made-in-Africa innovations to meet the needs of the continent. 

There is no doubt that green growth is a number one priority for governments but many are mistaken if they believe green growth is more costly, Frank Rijsberman Director-General, Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) told delegates at the high level policy dialogue session.

Rwanda’s new Bugesera airport, will be the first-ever green airport in Africa, and the government’s biggest-ever project. It will have rain water harvesting and cut water use by 50 percent, and will have enough solar panels to make it zero carbon emission facility said Rijsberman.

“Did the airport become expensive by adopting these changes? No. It became cheaper by five million US dollars,” he said.

The over 800 million dollar project is being funded through a public private partnership, and is one of many green projects the GGGI is working on with the government of Rwanda. GGGI is also supporting the implementation of the government’s plan for green development of six secondary cities as well as eco-friendly tourism by introducing electric motorbikes or e-motorbikes.

The e-motorbikes will be cheaper than petrol-powered ones demonstrating that green products do not have to be expensive said Josh Whale, the Chief Executive Officer of Ampersand, a company that is building electric vehicles and charging stations in East Africa. Supported by GGGI, it has introduced e-motorbikes into Rwanda and has plans for other electric vehicles.

“Assembling all the e-motorcycles in Rwanda will certainly result in several thousand new jobs and will also green existing jobs. So motorcycle and taxis mechanics will become green jobs,” said Whale.

The Forum is showcasing a number of other green-friendly initiatives that promote  environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive economic growth.

There are many opportunities for green entrepreneurship and private investment in transport, infrastructure and agriculture in Africa, said Rijsberman.

“Involving the private sector more, helping to drive innovation, helping to drive entrepreneurship, creating green jobs has to be a growing part of government green growth strategies,” he says.

During different panels and sessions there were comments about a large gap in youth interests in the environment and green technology and the difficulty accessing funding for innovations that could bring affordable green technologies to Africa.

Academic training is one of the best investments to be made right now said Stephen Rodriques, Rwanda’s Country Director at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). “We have to start preparing the young generation for green jobs,” Rodriques told delegates. “Many of the industries we have now are based on what we call the brown economy, where people are doing things and in ways that are destroying the environment.”

Rodriques also called for investment in innovative green projects and for stakeholders to improve their understanding and use of finance as a tool for climate resilience.

A common issue is quality projects in need of financing while financial institutions say they have the money for quality projects but can’t find them said Pablo Vieira, Global Director at NDC Partnership. This is a coalition of countries and institutions dedicated to strengthening collaboration among nations to help implement countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to reduce carbon emissions under the Paris Agreement.

“We work in 36 countries right now with governments saying they have many projects ready for financing but find it hard to get finance,” said Vieira. Meanwhile financial institutions are looking to finance quality projects.

Acknowledging that governments afford to support all projects, Vieira calls for a new system to help entrepreneurs build quality projects. He also appealed to financial institutions to change their “business as usual” approach for the way environmental funds are delivered.

The forum started on Monday 26 November and is set to close on Friday November 30.

Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, is described as one of the safest and cleanest cities in Africa. The country is now implementing its national development plan to create green secondary cities. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Oct 30 2018 (IPS)

An ambitious programme aimed at developing six green secondary cities in Rwanda is underway and is expected to help the country achieve sustainable economic growth through energy efficiency and green job creation.

At a time when natural resource efficiency is described as key for  secondary cities in Rwanda to move towards a green economy, the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) is supporting the government of Rwanda in implementing its National Development Plan by creating a National Roadmap for Developing Green Secondary Cities.

The government has identified six cities  to become green secondary cities: Huye (south), Muhanga (central south), Nyagatare (northeast), Rubavu (northwest), Musanze (north) and Rusizi (southwest).

The national roadmap serves as an implementation tool for the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy 2 (EDPRS2) and the Green Growth and Climate Resilience Strategy (GGCRS), and provides key actions and practical planning guidance to policymakers in order to strengthen economic growth, enhance the quality of health and basic services, and to address vulnerability in Rwanda’s Urbanisation process. 

As part of implementing the pillars of urbanisation as recommended in the roadmap, GGGI also provided support to draft the Rwanda Green Building Minimum Compliance and Standards that will strengthen  the current building codes to  accelerate green growth and low-carbon development in Rwanda’s urban areas.

With the urban population growing at 4.5 percent a year, more than double the global average, Rwandan officials are now emphasising the need to develop secondary cities as poles of growth as the country has set a target to achieve a 35 percent urban population by 2034.

In 2016 and 2017, GGGI in collaboration with the relevant government agencies developed a Green City Pilot visioning, parameters and concepts that will enable a demonstration effect on how green urbanisation could be showcased in a flagship project.

“The government initiative has so far helped to draw interested partners into providing technical and investment support to development of  these six secondary cities, and a number of project concepts have also been developed  into  green finance project to attract more investments into the cities,”” Daniel Okechukwu Ogbonnaya, the Acting Country Representative and Lead Rwanda Programme Coordination of the GGGI in Kigali, tells IPS.

Among some quick win projects that were identified during the development of the National Roadmap,  includes for example the Rubavu Eco-Tourism park in northwestern Rwanda, which aims to conserve the environment while improving the welfare of local people through job creation in the tourism and travel industry.

The initiative was facilitated to move from ideas into project concepts that could be used to access investment opportunities which has a good job creation potential when implemented

In Rwanda, some key interventions by GGGI to support a ‘green economy’ approach to economic transformation were to move from ideas into project concepts that could be used to access investment opportunities with potential job creation opportunities when implemented.

Major focuses of these interventions are mainly on sustainable land use management, promoting resilient transport systems, low carbon urban systems and green industry and private sector development.

“But the capacity to understand the paradigm shift at local level is evolving and do take time because  the subject area of green growth is still new,” Ogbonnaya says.

While the initiative appears to be a strategic tool for the National Strategy for Climate Change and Low Carbon Development that was adopted by Rwanda in 2011, experts suggest that it is also important for local administrative entities to understand the mechanisms of green urbanisation and secondary city development.

Some experts in urban planning believe that with the mindset for Rwanda’s green secondary cities development are changing from “quantity” to “quality,” top priority should be given to marrying individual and community interests in these remote urban settings.

“With the high rate of energy consumption growth, the new approach for green secondary cities seeks implementing and enforcing energy efficiency standards for industrial and residential uses,” Parfait Karekezi, who oversees Green and Smart City development at Rwanda Housing Authority, tells IPS.

A key focus of these government interventions is the provision of affordable housing with adequate water and sanitation facilities for secondary cities dwellers, promoting grouped settlements locally known as ‘Imidugudu’.

With the weak residential infrastructure in secondary cities  in Rwanda, Karekezi stresses that current efforts supported by GGGI are helping local authorities to adopt a set of housing standards with appropriate design for some parts such as windows to provide energy savings in electric lighting.

“Absolutely, Rwanda has a long way to go, there are  efforts to raise awareness on energy efficiency and other issues, such as urging people in these listed areas not to build housing that does not meet the required standards,” Karekezi tells IPS in an exclusive interview.

Within these efforts supported by GGGI, both climate change experts and Rwandan officials believe that the ability of secondary cities to create job opportunities would help draw people from rural areas as well as reduce the influx of people to Kigali.

Both Karekezi and Ogbonnaya are convinced that capacitating local actors and the private sector to understand how projects and concepts are designed represents a shift in how the implementation of green urbanisation will be managed.

Despite some successful projects including the ecotourism park initiative which needs a scale up investment to  to improve the welfare of local residents in Rubavu, a lakeside city in northwestern Rwanda where local residents and  experts believe that the focus should be more on private investments than on direct government aid.

In 2018, GGGI received approval to be the delivery partner on a 600,000 dollar Readiness Support project fund from the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which aims to ensure that the Government of Rwanda has improved capacity to develop and deliver green city development concepts, identify investment priorities. GGGI also supported the Rwanda GCF Direct Access Entity to access in 2018 the sum of 32.8 million dollars for “Strengthening Climate Resilience of Rural Communities in Northern Rwanda.”

But still, locally-based organisations and administrative authorities with private companies need to be the main actors for the successful implementations of the green cities initiative.

Currently GGGI is capacitating the local administrative entities in the listed secondary cities to develop their own District Development Strategies (DDS)  for six secondary cities as reference tools for the better implementation of green initiatives at local level.

Thanks to these interventions, some local actors are being empowered to implement projects such as garden cities, which have been described as another opportunity to attract investment and create employment as well.

“But to really grow, these green city projects needs to bring in financing and to get this happening, we need to have interesting projects and interesting businesses such as clean energies in which private companies can invest,” Karekezi tells IPS.

In Rwanda the banana disease BXW is detrimental to a crop and has far-reaching consequences not only for farmers but for the food and nutritional security of their families and those dependent on the crop as a source of food. Credit: Alejandro Arigón/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Sep 25 2018 (IPS)

When Telesphore Ruzigamanzi, a smallholder banana farmer from a remote village in Eastern Rwanda, discovered a peculiar yellowish hue on his crop before it started to dry up, he did not give it the due consideration it deserved.

“I was thinking that it was the unusually dry weather causing damage to my crop,” Ruzigamanzi, who lives in Rwimishinya, a remote village in Kayonza district in Eastern Rwanda, tells IPS.

But in fact, it was a bacterial disease.

Ruzigamanzi’s crop was infected with Banana Xanthomonas Wilt (BXW), a bacterial disease that affects all types of bananas and is known locally as Kirabiranya. "Our ongoing effort to develop, test, and deploy smart or normal mobile applications is a critical step towards cost-effective monitoring and control of the disease spread." -- Julius Adewopo, lead of the BXW project at IITA.

Here, in this East African nation, BXW is detrimental to a crop and has far-reaching consequences not only for farmers but for the food and nutritional security of their families and those dependent on the crop as a source of food.

Banana is an important crop in East and Central Africa, with a number of countries in the region being among the world’s top-10 producers, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database.

According to a household survey of districts in Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda, banana accounts for about 50 percent of the household diet in a third of Rwanda’s homes.

But the top factor affecting banana production in all three countries, according to the survey, was BXW.

Researchers have indicated that BXW can result in 100 percent loss of banana stands, if not properly controlled.

Complacency and lack of information contribute to spread of the disease

The BXW disease is not new to the country. It was first reported in 2002. Since then, there have been numerous, rigorous educational campaigns by agricultural authorities and other stakeholders, including non-governmental organisations.

Farmers in Ruzigamanzi’s region have been trained by a team of researchers from the Rwanda Agriculture Board and local agronomists about BXW. But Ruzigamanzi, a father of six, was one of the farmers missed by the awareness campaign and therefore lacked the knowledge to diagnose the disease.

Had he known what the disease was, and depending on its state of progress on the plant, Ruzigamanzi would have had to remove the symptomatic plants, cutting them at soil level immediately after first observation of the symptoms. If the infection is uncontrolled for a long time, he would have had to remove the entire plant from the root.

And it is what he ended up doing two weeks later when a visiting local agronomist came to look at the plant.

By then it was too late to save the banana stands and Ruzigamanzi had to uproot all the affected mats, including the rhizome and all its attached stems, the parent plant and its suckers.

Ruzigamanzi’s story is not unique. In fact, a great number of smallholder farmers in remote rural regions have been ignoring or are unaware of the symptoms of this bacterial banana infection. And it has increased the risk of spreading of the disease to new regions and of resurgence in areas where it had previously been under control. Several districts in eastern Rwanda have been affected by the disease in recent years.

An enumerator for the ICT4BXW project conducting a baseline assessment of Banana Xanthomonas Wilt (BXW), a bacterial disease, status in Muhanga district, Rwanda. Courtesy: Julius Adewopo/ International Institute of Tropical Agriculture

Using technology to strengthen rural farmers and control spread of BXW

Early 2018, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), in partnership with Bioversity International, the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies and the Rwanda Agriculture Board, commenced a collaborative effort to tackle the disease through the use of digital technology. IITA scientists are exploring alternative ways of engaging farmers in monitoring and collecting data about the disease. The institute is renowned for transforming African agriculture through science and innovations, and was recently announced as the Africa Food Prize winner for 2018.

The new three-year project (named ICT4BXW), which launched with a total investment of 1.2 million Euros from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, seeks to explore the use of mobile phones as tools to generate and exchange up-to-date knowledge and information about BXW.

The project builds on the increasing accessibility of mobile phones in Rwanda. According to data from the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority, this country’s mobile telephone penetration is currently estimated at 79 percent in a country of about 12 million people, with a large majority of the rural population currently owning mobile phones.

“Our ongoing effort to develop, test, and deploy smart or normal mobile applications is a critical step towards cost-effective monitoring and control of the disease spread,” says Julius Adewopo, who is leading the BXW project at IITA. He further explained that, “Banana farmers in Rwanda could be supported with innovations that leverages on the existing IT infrastructure and the rapidly increasing mobile phone penetration in the country.”

Central to the project is the citizen science approach, which means that local stakeholders, such as banana farmers and farmer extensionists (also called farmer promoters), play leading roles in collecting and submitting data on BXW presence, severity, and transmission. Moreover, stakeholders will participate in the development of the mobile application and platform, through which data and information will be exchanged.

About 70 farmer promoters from eight different districts in Northern, Western, Southern, and Eastern province will be trained to use the mobile phone application. They will participate in collecting and submitting data for the project—about incidence and severity of BXW in their village—via the platform. The project expects to reach up to 5,000 farmers through engagement with farmer promoters and mobile phones.

Further, data from the project will be translated into information for researchers, NGOs and policy makers to develop effective and efficient support systems. Similarly, data generated will feed into an early warning system that should inform farmers about disease outbreaks and the best management options available to them.

A real-time reporting system on the disease

While the existing National Banana Research Programme in Rwanda has long focused on five key areas of interventions with strategies used in the control or management of plant diseases, the proposed mobile-based solution is described as an innovative tool that it is easily scalable and flexible for application or integration with other information and communications technology (ICT) platforms or application interfaces.

“We observe limitations in the availability of reliable and up-to-date data and information about disease transmission patterns, severity of outbreaks, and effect of control measures,” Mariette McCampbell, a research fellow who studies ICT-enabled innovation and scaling on the ICT4BXW project, tells IPS. “We also have lack good socio-economic and socio-cultural data that could feed into farmer decision-making tools and an early warning system.”

The new reporting system intends to develop into an early warning system that will allow the Rwandan government to target efforts to mitigate the spread of BXW, it also aims to serve as a catalyst for partnerships among stakeholders to strengthen Banana production systems in the country.

“This [ICT] innovation could enable [near-]real-time assessment of the severity of the disease and support interventions for targeted control,” explains Adewopo.

The project team is currently working hard to co-develop the ICT platform, with farmer promoters and consultants. By the second quarter of 2019, tests with a pilot version of the platform will start in the eight districts where the project is active.

The project team have already identified a variety of scaling opportunities for a successful platform.“Problems with Banana Xanthomonas Wilt are not limited to Rwanda, neither is it the only crop disease that challenges farmers. Therefore, our long-term goal is to adapt the platform such that it can be scaled and used in other countries or for other diseases or other crops,” McCampbell explains.

According to Adewopo, “the vision of success is to co-develop and deploy a fully functional tool and platform, in alignment with the needs of target users and with keen focus on strengthening relevant institutions, such as the Rwanda Agricultural Board, to efficiently allocate resources for BXW control and prevention through democratised ICT-based extension targeting and delivery.”

There is increasing need for smarter and faster management of risks that have limited production in agricultural systems.

In recognition of BXW’s terminal threat to banana crops, there is no doubt that the use of ICT tools brings a new hope for banana farmers, and can equitably  empower them through improved extension/advisory access, irrespective of gender, age, or social status – as long as they have access to a mobile phone.

*Additional reporting by Nalisha Adams in Johannesburg

Zainab Bangura, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe.

By Lindah Mogeni
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 17 2016 (IPS)

The governments of Rwanda and Iraq have agreed to work together to fight rape as a weapon of genocide, noting disturbing similarities between sexual violence in Iraq today to the Rwandan genocide twenty years ago.

Just as targeted rape was as much a tool of the Rwandan genocide as the machete, an estimated 3000 Iraqi Yazidis under ISIL’s captivity are currently facing acts of genocide and targeted sexual violence, including sexual slavery.

Given Rwanda’s experience with sexual violence during the Rwandan genocide, Iraq’s permanent mission to the UN has signed a joint communique, an official statement establishing a relationship, with Rwanda’s permanent mission to the UN.

The joint effort will be aimed at sharing action plans to rehabilitate women victims and reintegrate them into their communities.

Rwanda was the first country where rape was recognised as a weapon of genocide by an international court. This court case was the subject of a documentary, The Uncondemned, which recently premiered at the UN.

The documentary is centred around the case of Jean Paul Akayesu, the mayor of Taba in Rwanda between April 1993 and June 1994, who was brought before the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda (ICTR).

Akayesu was found guilty of nine counts of genocide and crimes against humanity, including the landmark conviction of rape as an act of genocide, in 1998.

Prior to the film screening, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Zainab Bangura, described the importance of recognising rape as an act of genocide.

Bangura paid tribute to the Rwandan women who testified in the Akayesu trial as well as two Iraqi Yazidi women, one of whom is an ISIL rape survivor, present at the screening, and praised them for “giving other women the confidence to emerge from the shadows.”

A report to the UN human rights council has found that ISIL – also known as ISIS – has committed the crime of genocide against the Yazidis, an ethnically Kurdish religious group.

“The film demonstrates that only when survivors and civil society come together and join forces with investigators, prosecutors and policy makers, that justice can be delivered in its fullest sense,” said Bangura.

“The silver lining in these encounters is the exceptional courage and resilience of the rape victims to overcome their traumatic experience…they defied traditions and taboos by standing and speaking up, despite the fear of stigma and rejection or retribution from perpetrators,” said Jeanne D’arc Byaje, the Charge d’Affaires to the Permanent Mission of Rwanda to the UN.

Thousands of people were targeted with sexual violence during the Rwandan genocide, said the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide, Adama Dieng.

According to Byaje, in a span of 22 years since the genocide, Rwanda has “been able to reverse the deplorable situation by eliminating gender-based abuse and violence to increase the capacity of women and girls to protect themselves.”

Byaje called for “an international community that is a partner and not a bystander…and that is willing to work towards long-term efforts to promote unity and reconciliation.”

Iraq’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Mohamed Ali Ahakim, similarly appealed to the international community for help with the dire situation faced by Yazidi, as well as other minorities, women and children currently under ISIL”s captivity.

“Young women and children have been specifically targeted by ISIL and are being systematically sold in slave markets sometimes for a dollar or a pack of cigarettes…this is a tragedy that has not been experienced before in any of Iraq’s diverse communities,” said Ahakim.

However, Ahakim said that the problem is not confined to the current situation – “it would be easy to work with a coalition of 65 countries to defeat ISIL militarily.”

“The main problem is what we are going to do next once we liberate Iraq and free the young women and children…I don’t have the ability to comprehend the difficulties that will be faced trying to infuse normality into these communities,” said Ahakim

From the testimonies given at the UN, after the film screening, by the Rwandan witnesses at the Akayesu trial and the Yazidi rape survivor, it is evident that justice is the most crucial component of any next-step action plans for survivors.

“I decided to shame the act, I decided to put it out there, I wanted the truth to be known, but most importantly I wanted justice…what happened to us was horrible but we are still here…and that is because of justice” said one Rwandan witness, known as “Witness JJ”.

Yazidi rape survivor of ISIL, 18 year old Lea Le, who escaped her captors by tying scarves together and using them to climb out of a window along with some friends, said that “we should not hide what happened, it is very important for justice to be carried out…it is unfair that survivors have to wait so long for justice.”

Asked about the impact of the Akayesu case on other war crimes trials, Ambassador Pierre R. Prosper, the lead prosecutor during the Akayesu trial, admitted that there have been some subsequent prosecutions as result of the international precedent set by Akayesu’s case.

However, “we have lost the momentum, the political will to deal with the issue of not just rape but other genocide atrocities in general…we are waving the flag of saying this is wrong but we are not acting,” said Prosper.

Prosper called for governments to direct resources to relevant entities to pursue accountability and ensure justice.

“We need to re-energise ourselves,” said Prosper.

Women and children hold up signs at a rally against corruption in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 8 2015 (IPS)

A woman is stopped at a checkpoint; she gives birth, and dies. Another is sold in a slave market. A boy is killed by a tank. A young man drowns at sea, trying to reach a haven safe from oppression and poverty.

These were just some of the examples that Rima Khalaf, executive secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), touched on during a panel discussion on the importance of the rule of law held at the U.N. headquarters on Jul. 7.

In each of scenarios laid out above, Khalaf said, had the person in question been of a different race, ethnic group, gender or religion, they might have been spared an untimely or violent death. In other words, they might have been under the protection of the law.

All too often, however, citizens are either unable or unaware of how to demand their legal rights – be it access to food, jobs or justice.

As the U.N. closes a 15-year chapter of poverty eradication efforts defined by the eight ambitious Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and moves towards a new, sustainable development agenda, legal experts came together Tuesday to discuss how the rule of law can help bolster the post-2015 blueprint for global change.

Organised by the International Development Law Organisation (IDLO), an intergovernmental body devoted to empowering citizens and enabling governments to establish robust legal systems worldwide, the two-part event series revolved around Goal 16 of the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aims to build inclusive societies by providing equal justice to all.

Promoting and strengthening the rule law in the realm of international development would seem, as IDLO Director-General Irene Khan pointed out, “a no-brainer”.

“There is a paradox here at the U.N. that bothers me deeply,” Khan said at a panel co-hosted by the IDLO and the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn Law) Tuesday. “You can almost think of it as parallel railway lines, with two trains hurtling down these tracks through the landscape of the U.N. since its inception.

“One is the train that is running the development agenda, and the other is the train running the human rights agenda. I only hope that the principle of the rule of law that has now been acknowledged as part of the development agenda will bring these two tracks together – and that the meeting won’t be a crash but a synergy.”

Since its inception in 1988, the IDLO has remained the only organisation dedicated entirely to promoting the rule of law, repeatedly pushing for effective and accountable legal systems around the world as the basis for eradicating poverty, fighting discrimination and ensuring access to basic services.

It also highlights the links between inequality and lawlessness, where good governance seeps through cracks in weak justice systems, eroding the public’s confidence in the very structures that are designed to ensure their well-being.

Recounting a conversation she had with a chief justice in one of the IDLO’s partner countries, Khan said, “I was told that in this particular country people often say, ‘Why hire a lawyer if you can buy a judge?’ It is these situations that the rule of law addresses.”

In short, she said, the rule of law regulates power, a crucial step in the realisation of the SDGs.

“Poverty is not a matter of income,” she stressed. “It is a matter of powerlessness.”

Consider the following example from Uganda, where three-quarters of the population are subsistence farmers and where land disputes can have a heavy impact on livelihood and food security.

For many years, inefficient and informal justice systems meant that farmers, and particularly women, had no recourse to resolutions over even the most minor discord.

With the introduction in 1995 of the Uganda Land Alliance (ULA) – established to provide legal empowerment to rural communities through Land Rights Information Centres – fair land laws and policies, as well as swift access to justice, has become the norm, rather than the exception.

In Ecuador, an IDLO training programme on access to fair trade markets and the basic legal aspects of forming and running micro-enterprises has given local communities in predominantly rural areas significant leverage in tapping into new revenue streams.

And in Rwanda, where women held just 43 percent of seats in the lower parliament in 2003, a new constitution and the creation of women’s councils over the past decade pushed women’s political representation to 64 percent in 2013, resulting in stronger laws on violence against women and gender-based crimes.

Any number of similar examples, from Afghanistan to Kyrgyzstan to Kenya, stand as testimony to the sheer scope and significance of the rule of law for the global development agenda.

But while legal frameworks are vital to securing rights and enshrining the basic tenets of development in constitutions worldwide, they cannot and do not exist in a vacuum.

“Laws alone are not enough,” Khalid Malik, former director of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report noted during the panel discussion. “Many countries have all manner of statutes and conventions, but behaviors have not altered. If institutions are not pro-poor, change will not happen.”

He stressed that part of the problem lies in “institutions often being captured by the elites”, or other powerful interests, making them less accessible to marginalised groups.

What is needed, he says, is an approach to the rule of law that is rooted in justice, and the empowerment of ordinary people.

“When you have a universal approach to education and health,” he stated, “You empower people enormously. Think of the Arab Spring – it happened mostly in countries that were doing well on health and education. Why? Because once you’re educated, you become far more aware of your rights, you start expecting more from institutions, and the relationship between the citizen and the state starts to change.”

It is precisely this change that lawmakers hope to see as the U.N. finalizes its new development plans for a more just and sustainable world.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Distributing condoms in prisons and schools has set off a heated debate, rendering the fight against HIV/AIDS a challenge ahead of this year's U.N. deadline for nations to halt its spread. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/ IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Mar 28 2015 (IPS)

Tatenda Chivata, a 16-year old from Zimbabwe’s Mutoko rural district, was suspended from school for an entire three-month academic term after he was found with a used condom stashed in his schoolbag.

Regerai Chigodora, a 34-year-old prisoner at a jail in Harare, had his 36-year sentence stretched to 45 years after he was caught with used condoms in prison early this year.

With restrictions blocking the distribution of condoms in schools and prisons in Africa, health experts say the continent’s opportunity to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in line with the U.N. Millennium Development Goals may be squandered,

“It will be hard for Africa to win the war against HIV/AIDS if certain groups of people like students and prisoners are being skipped from preventive measures,” Tamasha Nyerere, an independent HIV/AIDS counsellor based in Dar es Salaam, the Tanzanian capital, told IPS.

Human rights activists in Zimbabwe say more cases of youths like Chivata and prisoners like Chigodora may be going unreported in countries where condom use in jails and schools is anathema.With restrictions blocking the distribution of condoms in schools and prisons in Africa, health experts say the continent’s opportunity to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in line with the U.N. Millennium Development Goals may be squandered.

“It’s indeed disturbing how hard we have worked as Africa to fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS yet we have not been so pragmatic in our bid to institute preventive measures in schools and jails, where most of our African governments have vehemently refused to allow condoms to be distributed with the common excuse that they promote homosexuality in jails and sexual immorality in schools,” Elvis Chuma, a gay activist in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare, told IPS.

Zimbabwean prisoner Chigodora agreed, telling IPS that “whether or not authorities here like it, homosexuality is rife in jails and even if we may smuggle in condoms to use secretly, if you get caught like in my case, you will be in for serious trouble.”

Schoolchildren in Africa like Zimbabwe’s Chivata have to contend with secret use of condoms in school. Their only crime is that they are underage, said Chivata.

“I’m serving a suspension from school because I was caught with a condom I used during sex with my girlfriend, but the same teachers teach us about use of protection if we get tempted to engage in sex. Now I’m wondering if I was wrong using a condom. Perhaps I could have gone undetected if I had opted to have unprotected sex,” he told IPS.

Under Zimbabwe’s Legal Age of Majority Act, any Zimbabwean under the age of 18 years is a minor, while a person between the age of 16 years and 18 years is defined as a young person under the Children’s Protection and Adoption Act.

Sodomy is also a punishable offence in Zimbabwe, which rights activists say, makes it difficult for this Southern African nation and other African nations to distribute condoms in prisons.

“African countries like Zimbabwe are being cornered by their own laws which bar them from dishing out condoms to prisoners and school children,” Tonderai Zivhu, chairperson of the Open Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS, a lobby group in Masvingo, Zimbabwe’s oldest town, told IPS.

South Africa and Namibia may be the only two out of Africa’s 54 countries that have adopted HIV/AIDS preventive measures in schools and jails.

In 2007, South Africa’s new Children’s Act came into effect, giving children 12 years and older the right to obtain contraceptives. The country’s Department of Correctional Services also provides condoms to inmates.

In Namibia, the country’s policy on HIV/AIDS states that all convicted prisoners awaiting trial and inmates are entitled to have access to the same HIV-related prevention information, education, voluntary counselling and testing, means of prevention, treatment, care and support as is available to the general population.

Other African countries, however, seem unclear about their position on condoms use in jails and schools.

Last year, the government of Rwanda confirmed the prevalence of homosexuality in prisons, but was non-committal on whether or not it would start distributing condoms in its correctional facilities.

This year, Zimbabwe’s Primary and Secondary Education Minister Lazarus Dokora told parliament that parents were free to pack condoms for their children in their schoolbags, but that the government would not allow them to be openly distributed at schools.

“We must say children are in school to learn and be initiated for certain life skills, and when it comes to condoms, you are the guardian of your child and you must have an intimate connection with your child so that when you pack their school luggage and prepare their books you can also pack condoms,” Dokora had said.

This laissez-faire approach has incensed certain African indigenous pro-culture activists who have been vocal in their calls against condom distribution in prisons and schools.

“Distributing condoms in prisons and in schools will render African governments accomplices to the commission of the crime of sodomy and sexual immorality among school-going children, which is against our cultural values and norms as Africans,” Bupe Mwansa, head of the Culture and Traditions Conservation Association in Zambia, an indigenous pro-culture lobby group, told IPS.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), an estimated 3.2 million children lived with HIV at the end of 2013, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, with approximately 145,000 HIV-positive children from Zimbabwe.

The Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZimStat) states that Zimbabwe has a total of 18,000 prisoners, with 28 percent of these living with HIV and AIDS.

In South Africa, an estimated 41.4 percent of that country’s 166,267 prisoners are also living with HIV/AIDS, based on statistics from the Ministry of Health there, despite the country being the only African nation that does not outlaw homosexuality.

Although other African governments admit there are sexual activities going on in schools and prisons, they remain hesitant to allow condom distribution in them.

“School children engage in premarital and often unprotected sex, yes we know, and prisoners also have unprotected anal sex, but presently there is nothing we can do as government to address these challenges because our laws do not allow underage children to engage in sex while homosexual, now rife in our jails, is also unlawful,” a top Zimbabwean government official speaking on the condition of anonymity told PS.

But for human rights doctors like Nomalanga Zwane in Johannesburg, fighting HIV/AIDS in schools and jails requires drastic measures.

“If school kids are left on their own with the belief that they are not engaging in sex because they are barred by being underage, we are fighting a losing battle against HIV/AIDS because the same school pupils will spread the disease even outside school while prison inmates with no access to condoms will also one day come out of jail and further spread the disease,” Zwane told IPS.

Zimbabwe’s ex-convicts like 37-year-old Jimson Gwatidzo, now an ardent campaigner for the distribution of condoms in jails after he contracted HIV in jail, sees no credible reason why some African governments forbid condoms in prisons “in the face of rampant rape-induced HIV/AIDS infections behind prison walls.”

“It is time for governments across Africa to scrap anti-sodomy laws to allow for the distribution of condoms in prisons and be able to fight HIV/AIDS spread in jails without legal barriers,” Gwatidzo told IPS.

Edited by Lisa Vives/Phil Harris    

As Juan Evo Morales Ayma, popularly known as ‘Evo’, celebrates his victory for a third term as Bolivia’s president on a platform of “anti-imperialism” and radical socio-economic policies, he can also claim credit for ushering in far-reaching social reforms such as the Bolivian “Law against Political Harassment and Violence against Women” enacted in 2012.

“In many countries women in the political arena, whether candidates to an election or elected to office, are confronted with acts of violence ranging from sexist portrayal in the media to threats and murder,” says the World Future Council (WFC), which monitors the gap between policy research and policy-making.

Speaking to IPS after the 2014 Future Policy Award for Ending Violence against Women and Girls ceremony, organised by WFC, the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and UN Women on Oct. 14, WFC founder Jacob von Uexkull told IPS that the Bolivian law “is a visionary law, particularly for protecting women against political harassment and violence.”“Achieving gender equality and ending violence against women and girls is a matter for both men and women ... violence against women is a human rights violation but also a social and public health problem, and an obstacle to development with high economic and financial costs for victims, families, communities and society as a whole” – Martin Chungong, IPU Secretary-General

“For the first time we introduced the category of what are called visionary laws which aim to curb violence against women in politics and other professions,” he said, adding that the passing of such a law in Bolivia is “very significant”, suggesting that other should emulate the Bolivian example.

The law against political harassment and violence against women was enacted in Bolivia by the Morales government following the assassination of Councillor Juana Quispe after she had complained about the abuse she suffered from other councillors and the mayor of her town. The law defines political harassment and political violence as criminal offences which carry imprisonment ranging from two to eight years depending on the magnitude of the offence.

The WFC, which promotes the world’s best laws and solutions for implementation by policy-makers in countries all over the world, chose to offer the “honourable mention” for the Bolivian law in the visionary category.

Based in Hamburg, Germany, the WFC was set up in 2007 to pioneer the campaign for the spread of best laws in different areas. Beginning in 2009, the WFC has been offering the Future Policy Award (FPA) for the strongest laws in the field of sustainable development.

The WFC identified the Belo Horizonte Food Security Programme in 2009 as the best law for the FPA to address the right to food. In 2010, the FPA went to Costa Rica for the best law to strengthen biodiversity. In 2011, it was awarded to Rwanda for its laws to protect forests, and in 2012 it was awarded to the Republic of Palau in the Pacific Ocean for the best laws to protect coasts.

Last year, the FPA went to the treaty for the prohibition of nuclear weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean.

With 2014 having been designated by WFC as the year for ending violence against women and girls, UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka says that governments must adopt a “comprehensive legal framework” that addresses violence against women, by “recognising unequal power relations between men and women” and advocating a “gender-sensitive perspective in tackling it.”

According to Martin Chungong, Secretary-General of IPU, the key message is that “achieving gender equality and ending violence against women and girls is a matter for both men and women.” Moreover, “violence against women is a human rights violation but also a social and public health problem, and an obstacle to development with high economic and financial costs for victims, families, communities and society as a whole.”

Michael Paymar (centre), member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, along with others behind the ‘Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence’ programme of Duluth, Minnesota, winner of this year’s gold Future Policy Award (FPA). Credit: Courtesy of World Future Council

This year’s WFC gold award went to the “Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence” programme of the City of Duluth in the U.S. state of Minnesota. Among others, said von Uexkull, the “Duluth model” has a shared philosophy about domestic violence and a system that shifts responsibility for victim safety from the victim to the system.

The “Duluth model” has helped countries formulate laws and policies based on the principles of coordinated community response and paved the way for the intervention of criminal justice in cases of intimate partner violence.

Each year, an estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner.

According to von Uexkull, such violence entails huge human, social, and economic costs which are estimated to be around 5.18 percent of world GDP.

HBO (Home Box Office), a U.S. pay television network, has recently produced a documentary entitled Private Violence, which looks at domestic violence against women. In an interview with The Guardian, Cynthia Hill, the documentary’s director, said: “The thing that I did not know that was so revealing to me was that anywhere between 50 percent and 75 percent of domestic violence homicides happen at the point of separation or after [the victim] has already left [her abuser].”.

One of the biggest issues facing women and girls today in the world, says Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, General Secretary of the Young Women Christian Association (YWCA), is violence. “I see the violence against women as a manifestation of inequalities, disempowerment and exclusion,” Gumbonzvanda told IPS. “It is the accumulation of many realities that women find in their own lives, particularly that of social disempowerment.”

To highlight the importance of enforcing and implementing existing laws to eradicate violence against women, the WFC gave awards this year to Austria and Burkina Faso for their stringent implementation of laws to protect women against violence. “When the justice system and specialised service providers work hand in hand, real progress can be made,” said von Uexkull.

However, as countries are preparing to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, there is not a single country in the world where we have succeeded in eliminating violence against women, warns Gertrude Mongella, Secretary-General of the Beijing conference, former President of the Pan-African Parliament and WFC Honorary Councillor from Tanzania.

“Many countries now have laws that protect women from violence,” Mongella told participants at the FPA ceremony. “However, women who report violence often face a range of challenges, including resistance or disbelief from law enforcement officers, judges and lawyers.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Akaliza Keza Gara is the founder and managing director of Shaking Sun, a multimedia business specialising in website development, graphic design and computer animation in Rwanda. She is one of the few women in the ICT sector. Credit: Orphelie Thalmas/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Aug 7 2014 (IPS)

Akaliza Keza Gara is only 27, but she’s achieved much for women in Rwanda’s technology sector in just a short space of time.

She is the founder and managing director of Shaking Sun, a multimedia business specialising in website development, graphic design and computer animation.

She has a list of accolades to her name, including being one of four Rwandan women entrepreneurs recognised in 2012 for their exceptional efforts in Information Communication Technology (ICT) by the International Telecommunication Union, and being appointed as a member of the 4Afrika advisory council for Microsoft this year."There is currently a growing need to nudge young Rwandan girls into being innovative, especially in the area of technology." -- Nancy Sibo, student

But Gara considers her main achievement as being part of a team of animators who worked on African Tales, the first ever cartoon series produced in Rwanda.

“Seeing my name in the credits [of the cartoon series] was a big moment for me and I am so thankful I had that opportunity,” she tells IPS.

As a university graduate in multimedia technology, Gara is convinced that since women are consumers of ICT, it is important that they are also a part of the developers of technology so they can ensure that there are more diverse products available that appeal to both genders.

However, Gara notes that there are a limited number of Rwandan women in the ICT industry.

“But there is  still hope that newer developments in the field of IT can now [see] women [working] alongside men,” she says.

There are no clear figures about the total number of women in the IT industry here. The blueprint for this Central African nation’s second phase of economic development emphasises transforming itself  from an agrarian to knowledge-based economy in order to achieve middle-income status by 2020.

A 2012 report by the United Nations Broadband Commission for Digital Development, praised Rwanda for laying a 2,500-km national fibre optic cable in order to provide broadband internet for all.

Rwanda  has been ranked seventh in Africa and 80th in the global ranking among countries that have embarked on boosting broadband affordability and uptake.

While the country has been developing national action plans on ICT since 2001, it is only recently that the need for women’s participation in the sector has been magnified.

Gara is among a group of young women entrepreneurs here who are promoting an initiative called “Girls In ICT Rwanda”, which was launched last year to encourage more girls and women to embrace the field.

The project provides grants to young women to implement and market their ICT projects. Money is allocated based on the innovation aspect for each project.

Goldon Kalema, a senior technologist in charge of e-government services coordination in the Rwanda’s Ministry of Youth and ICT, tells IPS that the initiative aims to promote and encourage the deployment and utilisation of ICTs.

“The skills development area is designated to be among the key five focus areas identified to fuel continued growth, ” he says.

In 2012, a knowledge and technology lab — known more commonly as KLab — was established as the first-ever ICT innovation centre in the country to bring innovators together and give them the resources they need to explore their ideas, learn from each other, and develop innovative technology.

However, young women still remain intimidated by the technology sector because of the stereotype that it was a male-dominated field.

“If women are part of and can make up a huge part of the market for ICT products, they can also enjoy the available opportunities alongside men in the ICT industry from both developer and end-user perspective,” Gara points out.

Gara believes that there is also a need to ensure that young women acquire relevant skills. “Girls In ICT Rwanda” also organises events for female students here, giving them an opportunity to showcase their ICT skills and meet role models.

It has led to the introduction of a wide variety of training courses that are provide free of charge and are intended especially for young women

“This training has been vital in helping a number of beneficiaries acquire new skills, which lead to new and interesting jobs,” Gara says.

Nancy Sibo, a young student in the faculty of Agricultural Engineering at the University of Rwanda, is winner of a contest called Ms. Geek Rwanda.

The competition, which is hosted by “Girls In ICT Rwanda” and is open to female university students who have come up with their own technology innovations, is in its first year.

Sibo developed a mobile application that allows farmers to find out in real time the nearest area where they can get access to veterinary services and artificial insemination.

“There is currently a growing need to nudge young Rwandan girls into being innovative, especially in the area of technology … and promoting the girl effect approach for the sustainable development of the nation,” Sibo tells IPS.

Meanwhile, Gara is doing just that with cartoons.

She is currently in the process of setting up an animation studio to create cartoons and films targeting African children.

“My commitment is to encourage more girls and women to join the ICT sector, but I also get the feeling that by establishing an animation studio this will showcase my innovations to help Rwandan children, by creating characters and settings that they can relate to and stories to entertain and inspire them,” she explains.

Edited by: Nalisha Adams