The Movement for Community-led Development

Article by Yvette Kambabazi

Featured Photo Credit: Rwanda Justice and Development.

Yvette Kambabazi is a passionate lawyer and young activist who works for the Rwanda Justice and Development (RJD), a young women-led NGO established in 2015 in the Gisagara district. With a mission to address social injustice and promote peace, RJD focuses on advocating for vulnerable and marginalized children and youth. In a new article, Yvette emphasizes RJD’s commitment to sustainable, community-led development and how learning from MCLD has affected their advocacy and capacity-building efforts.

Rwanda Justice and Development (RJD) is a young women-led Rwandan Non-governmental organization that was created on February 17th, 2015 in the Gisagara district of the Southern Province of Rwanda. 

RJD was created to promote social justice and peace with a special focus on children and young people from vulnerable and marginalized communities

Mission: To contribute to addressing social injustice and promoting peace with a special focus on children and young people from vulnerable and marginalized communities.

Objectives: 

• To advocate for the public social protection policy effectiveness with emphasis on young women and men from vulnerable and marginalized communities including   people with   disabilities;
• To promote adequate public financing accountability for inclusive and equitable development; 
• To promote environment protection and climate justice.

We are committed to working with communities. One of the main ways that we engage local communities in our work is by holding capacity strengthening meetings with community members. In these meetings, we identify the challenges that face them and collect necessary information about their needs, their choices, and the strategies that may be more effective for the project implementation within the community. This way, when the project is ongoing, community members are involved in the implementation, monitoring, and evaluation processes. 

Children and youth face serious challenges in Rwanda. One of the main ones is stunting due to malnutrition; it is estimated that 33.1% of children under 5 years old are stunted. The defilement of teenage girls also remains a challenge. Regarding livelihoods, we continue to see youth drop out of school, consequently ending up unemployed. The unemployment rate among youth is 21.5%, (18.2% among young women compared to 15.0% among young men). 

To address these challenges, Rwanda Justice and Development supports youth, especially teen mothers, by strengthening their capacity in early childhood development, entrepreneurship, and agriculture. We are committed to this work and are continuing to seek funding for other project proposals aiming to address these challenges that face children and youth. 

I am particularly looking forward to reinforcing our project entitled “Promotion of Nutrition and Food Safety for Teen Mothers and their Children in Gisagara District.” .”  The project contributes to promoting the welfare of teen mothers and their kids in the Gisagara district by capacitating the teen mothers in agriculture and tackling prevalent challenges against them such as malnutrition, unemployment, skills gaps, limited access to financial resources and markets, and the marginalization of certain groups.

Rwanda Justice and Development is part of the MCLD Rwanda National Association In Formation. Through MCLD, we learned to build our work on MCLD Rwanda association strategies, including:

1. Ensuring the evidence-based advocacy for legal and policy framework to support the MCLD goals and values in Rwanda using national, regional, and international Human Rights and Democratic governance mechanisms. 
   • It is not possible to implement any initiative that is not supported by the legal and policy framework within a country.
2. Ensuring capacity strengthening of members in terms of advocacy and influencing, programs and projects planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, resources mobilization, networking, and partnerships building, etc using the MCLD strategies and values.
   • Capacity strengthening is crucial to facilitate the effective implementation of the initiatives supporting communities using MCLD models.
3. Ensuring fund mobilizations for project proposals to be jointly implemented by members regardless of their domain of interventions. 
   • Every program or project needs financial support for impactful implementation within the community. 
4. Ensuring coordination of all initiatives aiming at promoting CLD in Rwanda
   • The coordination of initiatives helps in controlling duplication and scatteredness of efforts.