About Africa: About Burundi

Home and Rehabiliation Center for Street Children

LOCATION

Bugabira District, Kirundo Northern Province
(only a few hours drive from Kigali, Rwanda)

Thousands of vulnerable children in this region of Burundi currently need assistance. The ideal solution is for every child to be reintegrated into a family unit. Unfortunately, this is not possible for many orphans who are living on the street or who were separated from their parents during war.

The choice of the site has been motivated by three main reasons:

Especially high demand for these programs in Kirundo provice. The Burundi National Commission for AIDS control states that Kirundo has 79,000 OVCs, one of the highest populations in the country.
The proximity to Rwanda. Bugabira is a 3-4 hour drive from the Rwandan capital of Kigali. The road from Kigali to Bugabira was recently paved and it is an easy trip. The Amani Africa headquarters are located in Kigali and this proximity will ensure that our staff can regularly visit the home. Although we will have 2 staff members based in Bugabira who will be responsible for the children and the home, our leadership team will make regular trips to Bugabira from Kigali.
Community ties and support. The Amani Vice-President Charles Nkazamyambi grew up in Bugabira. He still has many family members and close friends living in this area. He has been operating informal programs for children in this area for many years and has a strong base of support. The Bugabira mayor and Kirundo governor are close friends and have been involved in these projects since their inception. The high level of community and government support will ensure the success of this home.

Charles Nkazamyampi and Amani Africa were recently asked by the international organization Right to Play to expand our sports and development programs to Burundi. We are in the process of negotiating a grant with them for these activities.

MISSION

Immediate goals:

Provide emergency support for 30 street children in Bugabira. These children are currently living on the streets, therefore our primary focus is to obtain the necessary support to prepare a house for their accommodation.
Provide them with regular food, medical care, and supervision.

Future goals:

Pay school fees for all 30 children to return to school.

Implement social-cultural education programs for the children living in the home, as well as other children in the neighborhood.

Model of Implementation

In 2003, Charles Nkazamyambi and Gasana Mutesi set up a similar home in the neighborhood of Nyamirambo, in Kigali, Rwanda. The Nyamirambo home is smaller than the proposed Bugabira home, but it has seen great success in helping to reintegrate street children. The boys who live in the Nyamirambo Home were living on the streets for long periods of time. They were participating in the other Amani programs when they told Charles and Gasana that they desperately needed a place to live.

Currently, all 17 boys in the Nyamirambo Home are in school and receiving top grades. Three of the older boys recently moved out in order to rent their own homes while finishing school. This is a sign of great encouragement to our programs. As previously mentioned, we do not want to foster a sense of dependency among these children. Rather, the Amani home should provide the opportunity and resources for former street children to pursue their education and provide for themselves.

The main purpose of this facility is to assist children in the rehabilitation process. This is done by creating a safe environment conductive to academic studies and psycho-social counselling We aim to eventually help all these children find families who can support them. We are not opening an orphanage in Bugabira.

As with all Amani Africa programs, the concepts of reconciliation and peace-building are the foundation of all interactions with these vulnerable children. More than just providing these children with food and housing, we are teaching them concepts such as peaceful resolution of conflict and promoting inter-cultural dialogue. These are the first steps of the process to healing a region devastated by decades of civil war and genocide. The Amani home will house children of all ethnicities.

Selection of children

While we wish that we could provide support to every vulnerable child in Rwanda and Burundi, we only have the resources to help a very limited number. We have had to develop a system for choosing which children will receive support. As with the home in Kigali, children will be selected based on their proven dedication to returning to support and their previous involvement in the Amani Africa human rights activities. We have already identified 30 boys between the ages of 8-15 who will live in the Bugabira home. Because of the local culture, we cannot have young boys and girls living in the same home. Therefore, we have chosen to open the first home for boys, and will open an additional home for girls once we have the funds.

CURRENT STATUS

We have already selected a home in Bugabira and we are in the process of re-painting it. We will move the kids in as soon as we have the funds to support them. We are hoping to secure school scholarships for the 30 boys as soon as possible so that they can begin attending school when the next term starts in August.

FUTURE PLANS FOR AMANI AFRICA IN BURUNDI

This emergency intervention should evolve into more constant action and support that will let the transit home play a more prominent role in the community.

Future plans include:

Setting up a socio-economic integration for single mothers as a preventive measure for the street children phenomena
Open another transit home on the other side of Bugabira
Set up a vocational training center for dropout children ages 13 years and up, as well as a tutoring program to help school drop-outs catch up on their studies and return to school.
Implement permanent socio-cultural activities in the transit home and in refugee camps in the region.

BUDGET