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Foundation Rwanda Inc is a USA-based organization, founded in 2007, to support rape survivors and their children in Rwanda. [1] The organization is based in New York, United States of America. [2]
In February 2006, photojournalist Jonathan Torgovnik traveled to East Africa on behalf of Newsweek magazine to develop the story for the 25th anniversary of HIV/AIDS. While there, he met Margaret, a Rwandan survivor who was brutally raped during the genocide, impregnated, and contracted HIV. This horrific story led Torgovnik to embark on a photography project to document and tell the stories of 30 women like Margaret. [3] He learned an estimated 20,000 children were born from rape during the genocide and that their mothers were unable to afford the secondary school fees to keep these children in school. While sympathizing with the ongoing challenges these women and children face daily, Torgovnik joined with a non-profit professional, Jules Shell to create Foundation Rwanda in 2007 which would in turn help these women. [4]
Currently, all of Rwanda’s estimated 20,000 children born of rape will be turning eighteen and be eligible for secondary school. The annual tuition rates are as follows: PreK $7500 Kindergarten: $15,356, grades 1-5: $20,790, grades 6-8: $22,208, and grades 9-12: $24,806. Families also incur initial application and registration fees of $500 for Pre-K and KG to $1,000 from G1 to 12 with a family maximum of $2,000. [5]
Foundation Rwanda is currently sponsoring the secondary school fees for 830 children to sponsor 1500 children in 2012. [6] It partners with local NGOs to establish outreach programs throughout the country, which identifies affected families, pays secondary school fees directly to the partner schools, and supplies the necessary books, uniforms, and transportation to enable the children to attend school.
To date, Foundation Rwanda also connects families to a range of psychological, social, and medical services provided by existing local partners. [7]
In 2008, London's National Portrait Gallery recognized one of Torgovnik's photographs, awarding it first prize in its prestigious annual portrait competition. [8]
The Rwandan genocide occurred between 7 April and 15 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. During this period of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were killed by armed Hutu militias. Although the Constitution of Rwanda states that more than 1 million people perished in the genocide, the real number killed is likely lower. The most widely accepted scholarly estimates are around 500,000 to 800,000 Tutsi deaths.
Hotel Rwanda is a 2004 docudrama film co-written and directed by Terry George. It was adapted from a screenplay by George and Keir Pearson, and stars Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo as hotelier Paul Rusesabagina and his wife Tatiana. Based on the Rwandan genocide, which occurred during the spring of 1994, the film documents Rusesabagina's efforts to save the lives of his family and more than 1,000 other refugees by providing them with shelter in the besieged Hôtel des Mille Collines. Hotel Rwanda explores genocide, political corruption, and the repercussions of violence.
Gendercide is the systematic killing of members of a specific gender. The term is related to the general concepts of assault and murder against victims due to their gender, with violence against men and women being problems dealt with by human rights efforts. Gendercide shares similarities with the term 'genocide' in inflicting mass murders; however, gendercide targets solely one gender, being men or women. Politico-military frameworks have historically inflicted militant-governed divisions between femicide and androcide; gender-selective policies increase violence on gendered populations due to their socioeconomic significance. Certain cultural and religious sentiments have also contributed to multiple instances of gendercide across the globe.
Young Heroes is a charity, based in Mbabane, Swaziland. With a focus on orphaned and vulnerable children and their elderly caretakers, Young Heroes directly addresses the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Swaziland — the nation with the world’s highest rate of infection — on three fronts: education and prevention; healthcare; and impact mitigation/poverty reduction.
Anne-christine d'Adesky is an American author, journalist and activist of French and Haitian descent living in New York. She has maintained a deep relationship with Haiti, reporting the 2010 earthquake from a feminist angle, especially noting the impact of the disaster on the lives of teenage girls. She has also contributed to humanitarian projects in East Africa, as well as conducting extensive research into HIV/AIDS and its treatment worldwide.
Survivors Fund (SURF), founded in 1997, represents and supports survivors of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in Rwanda. It is the principal international charity with a specific remit to assist survivors of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and has offices in London and Kigali. It is registered with the Charity Commission for England & Wales.
Rwanda faces a generalized epidemic, with an HIV prevalence rate of 3.1 percent among adults ages 15 to 49. The prevalence rate has remained relatively stable, with an overall decline since the late 1990s, partly due to improved HIV surveillance methodology. In general, HIV prevalence is higher in urban areas than in rural areas, and women are at higher risk of HIV infection than men. Young women ages 15 to 24 are twice as likely to be infected with HIV as young men in the same age group. Populations at higher risk of HIV infection include people in prostitution and men attending clinics for sexually transmitted infections.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the east of the country in particular, has been described as the "Rape Capital of the World", and the prevalence and intensity of all forms of sexual violence has been described as the worst in the world. Human Rights Watch defines sexual violence as "an act of a sexual nature by force, or by threat of force or coercion", and rape as "a form of sexual violence during which the body of a person is invaded, resulting in penetration, however slight, of any part of the body of the victim, with a sexual organ, or of the anal or genital opening of the victim with any object or other part of the body."
Jonathan Torgovnik is an Israeli photographer and photojournalist. He lives in Johannesburg, in South Africa. He spent two years in Rwanda photographing women who had been systematically raped during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and the children born from those rapes. The photographs and the story were published in the Daily Telegraph magazine in 2007. A charity, Foundation Rwanda, was founded as a result. In 2014, Torgovnik returned to Rwanda. In 2015 he documented the lives of migrants who have moved, many of them illegally, to South Africa from other African countries such as Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Malawi.
Same Sky is a cause-based trade initiative that provides training and employment for HIV-positive women survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide struggling to lift themselves out of poverty. Same Sky is headquartered in New York City.
Godeliève Mukasarasi is a Rwandan social worker, genocide survivor, and rural development activist. She created the organization Sevota to support widowed women and their children after the genocide. In 2018 she was given an International Women of Courage award for her work.
Genocidal rape, a form of wartime sexual violence, is the action of a group which has carried out acts of mass rape and gang rapes, against its enemy during wartime as part of a genocidal campaign. During the Armenian Genocide, the Greek genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the second Sino-Japanese war, the Holocaust, the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Bosnian War, the Rwandan genocide, the Congolese conflicts, the South Sudanese Civil War, the Yazidi Genocide, Rohingya genocide, and the Uyghur genocide, the mass rapes that had been an integral part of those conflicts brought the concept of genocidal rape to international prominence. Although war rape has been a recurrent feature in conflicts throughout human history, it has usually been looked upon as a by-product of conflict and not an integral part of military policy.
During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, over the course of 100 days, up to half a million women and children were raped, sexually mutilated, or murdered. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) handed down the first conviction for the use of rape as a weapon of war during the civil conflict, and, because the intent of the mass violence against Rwandan women and children was to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular ethnic group, it was the first time that mass rape during wartime was found to be an act of genocidal rape.
Jacqueline Murekatete is a human rights activist, and founder of the NGO Genocide Survivors Foundation. Aged nine Murekatete lost the majority of her family during the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi, she was granted asylum in 1995 in the US, where she was brought up by her uncle. Murekatete began to tell her story after David Gewirtzman, a survivor of The Holocaust, spoke of his experiences at her school.
During the first and second conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), all armed parties to the conflict carried out a policy of genocidal rape, with the primary purpose being the total destruction of communities and families. Such was the violence directed at and carried out towards women that Human Rights Watch (HRW) described it as "a war within a war". HRW has reported that as of March 2013, civil conflict had reignited when the militia, March 23 Movement (M23), resumed hostilities following a ceasefire.
Youth in Rwanda constituted 40% of the resident population in 2012, numbering 4.1 million. The Republic of Rwanda's Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Sports defines youth as those from age 14 to 35 years. Like many developing countries, Rwanda's population as a whole is quite young. Over 50% of the Rwandan population is under 20 years old and the median age of the population is 22.7 years old. Urban areas of Rwanda have a higher percentage of youth than rural areas, though 80% of young people in Rwanda live in rural areas. Youth constitute over 53% of the population within the capital, Kigali. The youth population in Rwanda grew by 30% from 2002 to 2012.
As of 2018, the African country Rwanda ranks in the top five countries for gender equality according to the Global Gender Gap Report. The idea of fairness that dominates this country arose after the genocide against the Tutsi that occurred in 1994. The government is committed to ensuring equal rights for women and men without prejudice to the principles of gender equality and complementarity in national development. These ideas are exhibited through the roles of Rwanda women in government, the respect for women's education and the role of women in Rwanda healthcare. The country also took an active stance against rape in genocide, created a national action plan after United Nations Resolution 1325, and is pushing towards ending gender-based violence.
Etienne Karita is a Rwandan scientist who has been researching HIV/AIDS in Rwanda since the mid-1980s. He has held numerous leadership positions in different organizations that are working to control HIV in Rwanda. Some of his work is concentrated on preventing mother to child transmission of HIV and in collaboration with Projet San Francisco, he has studied HIV in discordant couples.
Beatrice Mukansinga is a Rwandan women's rights activist who focuses on women who were adversely affected by the Rwanda genocide.
Consolee Nishimwe is a Rwandan author, a motivational speaker, and a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
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