Jonny Harrison is sailing to Australia from the UK via the Panama Canal before he starts work in Sydney on a secondment at his firm PricewaterhouseCoopers »
Andrew Hebden is Assistant Editor (Business) of The Journal »
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Ross Smith, Head of Policy and Research at the North-East Chamber of Commerce »
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Jonathan Wheatley from Stokesley-based MC Ware writes about IT matters »
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Curator Danielle Pender shares the peaks and pitfalls of working with 21 designers on a month-long exhibition »
Paul Williamson is from Deloitte »I was reading this morning that women are leading Rwanda to a brighter future. Of course, this makes sense when you realise that women form over 70% of the population there.
This startling statistic is down to the genocide, when around a million people were murdered in 100 days and 500,000 women and young girls were raped. However, human spirit has won through, with as many as six orphaned children being taken in by each household. With over a third of Rwandan homes being led by women, there are many mothers bringing up other people’s children as their own.
So the real story of Rwandan women should not be the suffering but the ability to overcome such horrific obstacles with dignity, grace and determination to create a better life for them and their families.
As a result of their courage to speak out, for the first time in history rape is being prosecuted as a war crime. What’s more, the 2003 election attributed 49% of parliament seats to women, which is the highest in the world (world average 15.2%). This enables women to have a voice and a platform to be heard.
One of the organisations that Shared Interest Foundation will be working with throughout our project is Gahaya Links, which was set up by two Rwandan women that were born in a refugee camp in Uganda. They started their business in 2003 to help Rwandan women make handicraft items and find a market to through which to sell them. Starting out with six women sitting under a tree making baskets, Gahaya Links now involves over 3,000 women.
These are the women of Rwandan today, the ones who see things differently. The women who work together regardless of tribal differences, regardless of the traumas they have overcome, regardless of poverty, ill health, stress and despair and they emerge with hope and an unfaltering outlook
These are the people that we will help throughout this project. It is the Rwandan people themselves who will do the real work and Shared Interest Foundation will offer the guidance to help them on their way as they continue to work towards empowering the people of Rwanda.
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