 | This article contains content that is written like an advertisement .(April 2022) |
| Company type | Non-profit organization |
|---|---|
| Industry | International development |
| Founded | July 2010 |
| Headquarters | Kampala, Uganda |
Key people | Sasha Fisher (Founder) |
| Website | www.sparkmicrogrants.org |
Spark MicroGrants is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that focuses on helping communities to organize and make progress, they work primarily in East Africa.
Spark MicroGrants has worked to put families facing poverty as the driving seat of local change since July 2010. Spark’s key innovation is the Facilitated Collective Action Process (FCAP), in which a series of curated village meetings are held paired with a seed grant. In these meetings, impoverished families in villages plan and launch initiatives that range from schools to farms.
On average, 64 women and men, young and old, work and take action together. Since 2010, Spark has enabled over 170 villages to drive change through the FCAP across five countries. FCAP achieved 91% project sustainability and 94% of villages continue the process, meeting and taking action.
Today Spark curates the community of practices to elevate the FCAP and support networks around the globe to use and develop the FCAP for their contexts. Such as the Government of Rwanda on a national decentralization program, a legal empowerment network in West Africa and a progressive refugee integration strategy in Uganda.
Spark MicroGrants began its work in Rwanda in 2010. Today the Spark process is used across Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Spark has been touted as an organization that will transform aid distributed to people and build a world with dignity.
In 2011, Spark MicroGrants was featured in Forbes magazine [1] and was a semi-finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. [2]
Spark MicroGrant's model has been used to support 160+ community partners across Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ghana to launch local projects, with the support of foundations and private donors. [3]
Human occupation of Rwanda is thought to have begun shortly after the last ice age. By the 11th century, the inhabitants had organized into a number of kingdoms. In the 19th century, Mwami (king) Rwabugiri of the Kingdom of Rwanda conducted a decades-long process of military conquest and administrative consolidation that resulted in the kingdom coming to control most of what is now Rwanda. The colonial powers, Germany and Belgium, allied with the Rwandan court.
The East African Community (EAC) is an intergovernmental organisation composed of eight countries in East Africa. The member states are the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Federal Republic of Somalia, the Republics of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania. Salva Kiir Mayardit, the president of South Sudan, is the current EAC chairman. The organisation was founded in 1967, collapsed in 1977, and was revived on 7th July 2000. The main objective of the EAC was to foster regional economic integration.
The First Congo War (1996–1997), also nicknamed Africa's First World War, was a civil war and international military conflict which took place mostly in Zaire, with major spillovers into Sudan and Uganda. The conflict culminated in a foreign invasion that replaced Zairean president Mobutu Sese Seko with the rebel leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Kabila's unstable government subsequently came into conflict with his allies, setting the stage for the Second Congo War in 1998–2003.
There are about 300,800 members of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, in Africa. African Friends make up around 62% of Friends internationally, the largest proportion on any one continent. Kenya has the largest number of Quakers in a single nation – about 146,300 in the year 2012.
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Fondation Chirezi (FOCHI) is a local non-governmental organisation established in the African Great Lakes Region by Floribert Kazingufu Kasirusiru. The core objective of FOCHI is to build a campaign for a non-killing society in the Great Lakes Region - eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) which has suffered both the Second Congo War and terrible waves of genocide in both Rwanda and Burundi.
"Since the early 1990s the African Great Lakes region – defined here as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania – has been convulsed by genocide, civil wars, inter-state conflict and flawed democratic transitions. With UN-sponsored peace processes underway in DRC and Burundi and projects of state and societal reconstruction apparently advancing in Rwanda and Uganda, there are hopes that the epoch of violence and exploitation in the African Great Lakes region is finally drawing to an end."
The blue-headed coucal is a species of cuckoo in the family Cuculidae. It is native to tropical central Africa where its typical habitat is swamps, river banks, forest edges and generally wet locations. It is a common bird with a wide range, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature has rated its conservation status as being of "least concern".
The East African Federation is a proposed political union of the eight sovereign states of the East African Community in the African Great Lakes region – Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Somalia and Uganda – as a single federated sovereign state. The idea of this federation has existed since the early 1960s but has not yet come to fruition for several reasons. In September 2018, a committee was formed to begin the process of drafting a regional constitution, and a draft constitution for the confederation was set to be written by the end of 2021 with its implementation by 2023. However, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted plans to draft and implement a constitution. On 20 March 2023, the EAC announced that the drafting process would resume in May of that year in Kenya.
The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) is a partnership among the Nile riparian states that “seeks to develop the river in a cooperative manner, share substantial socioeconomic benefits, and promote regional peace and security”. The NBI began with a dialogue among the riparian states that resulted in a shared vision objective “to achieve sustainable socioeconomic development through the equitable utilization of, and benefit from, the common Nile Basin water resources." It was formally launched in February 1999 by the water ministers of nine countries that share the river: Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as well as Eritrea as an observer. From its beginning the Nile Basin Initiative has been supported by the World Bank and by other external partners. The World Bank has a mandate to support the work of the NBI, as lead development partner and as administrator of the multi-donor Nile Basin Trust Fund. One of the partners is the "Nile Basin Discourse", which describes itself as "a civil society network of organisations seeking to achieve positive influence over the development of projects and programmes under the Nile Basin Initiative".
Self Help Africa is an international charity that promotes and implements long-term rural development projects in Africa. Self Help Africa merged with Gorta in July 2014, and in 2021 merged with UK-based INGO, United Purpose. The organisation also owns a number of social enterprise subsidiaries - Cumo Microfinance, TruTrade and Partner Africa.
KCB Group Limited, also known as the KCB Group, is a financial services holding company based in the African Great Lakes region. The Group's headquarters are in Nairobi, Kenya, with its subsidiaries being KCB Bank Kenya Limited, KCB Bank Burundi Limited, KCB Bank Rwanda Limited, KCB Bank South Sudan Limited, KCB Bank Tanzania Limited, KCB TMB Congo and KCB Bank Uganda Limited.
The International Bamboo and Rattan Organization (INBAR) is an independent intergovernmental organization established in 1997 to develop and promote innovative solutions to poverty and environmental sustainability using bamboo and rattan.
The Great Lakes Twa, also known as Batwa, Abatwa or Ge-Sera, are a Bantu speaking group native to the African Great Lakes region on the border of Central and East Africa. As an indigenous pygmy people, the Twa are generally assumed to be the oldest surviving population of the Great Lakes region. Current populations of Great Lakes Twa people live in the states of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and the eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2000 they numbered approximately 80,000 people, making them a significant minority group in these countries. The largest population of Twa is located in Burundi estimated in 2008 at 78,071 people.
Africa Humanitarian Action (AHA) is a non-governmental organization that provides relief services to countries in Africa. It was founded by Dr. David Zawde in 1994 in response to the Rwandan genocide.
The Bahá’í Faith in Burundi begins after 1916 with a mention by ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, then head of the religion, that Bahá’ís should take the religion to the regions of Africa. The first specific mention of Burundi (Urundi) was in May 1953 suggesting the expanding community of the Bahá’í Faith in Uganda look at sending Bahá’í pioneers to neighboring areas like Burundi as part of a specific plan of action. The first settlers of the religion arrived in the region by June. By 1963 there were three Bahá’í Local Spiritual Assemblies in Burundi-Ruanda. Through succeeding organizations of the countries in the region, the National Spiritual Assembly of Burundi was first formed in 1969 but was successively dissolved and reformed a number of times - most recently reforming in 2011. Even though the religion was banned for a time, and the country torn by wars, the religion grew so that in 2005 the Association of Religion Data Archives estimated just about 6,800 Baháʼís in Burundi.
The 2017 Rugby Africa season contains a series of rugby union tournaments scheduled for 2017 and organised by the governing body of rugby union in Africa, Rugby Africa. The top-tier event is the Rugby Africa Gold Cup – formerly simply known as the Africa Cup – a six-team competition which was played on a round-robin basis from June to August 2017.
Grania Rosette Makatu Rubomboras is a Ugandan electrical engineer and corporate executive. She is the Programme Officer, Power Project of the Nile Equatorial Lakes Subsidiary Action Program, based in Kigali, Rwanda, where she heads the Power Development and Trade Department.
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The Bugesera invasion, also known as the Bloody Christmas, was a military attack which was conducted against Rwanda by Inyenzi rebels who aimed to overthrow the government in December 1963. The Inyenzi were a collection of ethnically Tutsi exiles who were affiliated with the Rwandan political party Union Nationale Rwandaise (UNAR), which had supported Rwanda's deposed Tutsi monarchy. The Inyenzi opposed Rwanda's transformation upon independence from Belgium into a state run by the ethnic Hutu majority through the Parti du Mouvement de l'Emancipation Hutu (PARMEHUTU), an anti-Tutsi political party led by President Grégoire Kayibanda. In late 1963, Inyenzi leaders decided to launch an invasion of Rwanda from their bases in neighbouring countries to overthrow Kayibanda. While an attempted assault in November was stopped by the government of Burundi, early in the morning on 21 December 1963, several hundred Inyenzi crossed the Burundian border and captured the Rwandan military in camp in Gako, Bugesera. Bolstered with seized arms and recruited locals, the Iyenzi—numbering between 1,000 and 7,000—marched on the Rwandan capital, Kigali. They were stopped 12 miles south of the city at Kanzenze Bridge along the Nyabarongo River by multiple units of the Garde Nationale Rwandaise (GNR). The GNR routed the rebels with their superior firepower, and in subsequent days repelled further Inyenzi attacks launched from the Republic of the Congo and Uganda.