Child and Youth Aid Rwanda
Nyamvumvu, a district roughly 30 km north of the Rwandan capital Kigali, was once without even a single school – but was home to countless children in severe poverty with poor prospects for the future. Today, things are very different: charitable donations made it possible to build a preschool – HAPPY KIDS SCHOOL – in Nyamvumvu in 2019. Featuring three classrooms, a teachers’ lounge and bathroom facilities, it opened its doors in 2020. In 2021, a school kitchen with a covered outdoor canteen and a lower primary school (for children aged 5–7) were added to enable children in Nyamvumvu to access ongoing, long-term school education. The school also features a playground.
In total, 150 children now attend baby, middle and top class (for children aged 2–4) and lower primary education at Happy Kids School. A traditional Rwandan graduation ceremony is held each year for all children graduating from preschool.
Ongoing costs (including teachers’ salaries, school books, teaching and learning materials, breakfast and lunch) are covered through child sponsorships. School sponsorship arrangements and one-off donations also finance maintenance of the school building and grounds, procurement of furniture and technical equipment, and the wages for cleaning, security and kitchen staff.
The first children will graduate from the lower primary school in the summer of 2025. With this in mind, Corporate Benefits Germany GmbH plans to support construction of three more classrooms to create an upper primary school. Further buildings for a range of specialist subjects, additional toilets, a school library and sports facilities are currently in the pipeline, along with construction of a secondary and vocational school.
Child and Youth Aid Rwanda (Kinder- und Jugendhilfe Ruanda e.V.) emerged from a project launched in 1999 to help Rwandan orphans who had lost their parents in the genocide of 1994. Personal sponsorships subsidized the childrens’ living costs and enabled them to access school education.
Since then, many of the “first generation” of sponsored children have left school, earned degrees or vocational qualifications, and are standing on their own two feet. Over the years, the charity began to accept children who had not been directly affected by the genocide but were still in need of support. Many families in Rwanda live below the poverty line, especially those in rural areas, which means their children are rarely able to attend school. The charity’s primary objective is to enable these children to access full school and vocational education, which opens up long-term prospects for them to build a better life.
Since 2016, Child and Youth Aid Rwanda’s activities have been coordinated by a voluntary team in Düsseldorf and a project partner in Rwanda. The charity is a registered association (eingetragener Verein – e.V.) under German law and is also registered as an international NGO in Kigali, Rwanda.