Rwanda Radio Project for Orphans

There are over 101,000 child headed households in Rwanda. The country still has a disproportionate number of vulnerable children living without adult guidance. Children are dealing with the effects of the incredibly high number of rapes that occurred during and after the war. Although Rwanda’s HIV/ AIDS rate is declining, down from 9% ten years ago, to an estimated 4%, most children we met were orphaned because of it. Most children have sacrificed their education to enable their younger siblings to attend school. Thanks to your donations, we distributed wind-up and solar-powered Lifeline radios to ensure these children have on demand access to crucial information and education.

The Lifeline radio provides guidance and education that would normally be given by a parent. We asked what young people listen to on the radios they received. The group said they listen to programs on children’s rights and learn how to be vocal about violence against women being against the law. For the first time, we heard groups speak openly about the future and working together for the benefit of all Rwandans. Without their Lifeline radios, they said these were new things that they would not know or easily be able to find out. One radio was given to Jean de Dieu Bakundo’ family. Jean is 17, looks after his half-sisters, Helene, 12, Florentine, 9. Jean’s father died in the war and his mother remarried and gave birth to Helene and Florentine with the new husband but they both died in 2003 of TB. Jean has been caring for the girls ever since and is completely devoted to them. The radio content he finds most valuable is programming about childcare and children’s rights. He also said that because he never had the possibility to attend school, he feels a little humiliated however, the Lifeline radio gives him ‘a lot of knowledge about many things’.

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FREEPLAY FOUNDATION IS NOW KNOWN AS LIFELINE ENERGY: We are delighted to announce that from April our new name is Lifeline Energy.

Operating as Freeplay Foundation has served us well for the past 11 years, however, we feel that our new name better reflects our wider mission to tackle energy poverty head-on for the poorest and most vulnerable.

In addition to including Lifeline radios and Lifelights in projects and programs, in the near future Lifeline Energy will launch a brand new, revolutionary communications tool that we believe will have a profound impact on education and information access in the developing world. We will send you more news about this soon.

We will continue to focus our research on the impact of dangerous kerosene, firewood and candles, and the harmful effects these have on vulnerable women and children. This better equips us to create clean energy products and to advocate approaches that reduce their use and improve quality of life.

Lifeline Energy remains a 501 (c)(3) registered charity in the USA, a registered charity in the UK and is a Section 18A and 21 non-profit in South Africa.Please visit our redesigned website and learn more about Lifeline Energy; www.lifelineenergy.org. All email addresses that were formerly @freeplayfoundation.org will now be @lifelineenergy.org.

Bugasera is an area in Rwanda where prior to the genocide, the population was 64,000, after wards 2,000. We spoke with 30 (50/50 female/male) child heads of households who had received our Lifeline radios 6 months ago. Between the ages of 12 and 20, they had walked up to three hours to come.

Our first visit was in 1999, there were pockets of ‘feral’ children - hundreds of child-only families living in round mud and thatch houses. Children wore rags showing their distended stomachs, trying to eke out an existence by subsistence farming with little or no adult guidance. Water had to be collected from a swampy area at the bottom of the hill an hour’s walk away. It was impossible to imagine that children would have to live like this. Understandably, they seldom smiled or laughed.

We asked a series of questions to only girls and only boys and then together. We wanted to learn about what they listen to, what they’ve learned or do differently since having the Lifeline radio.

To sum up their comments, all said that they listen to ‘amakuru’ – the news. They want to know what is going on not just in Rwanda, but they’re curious about what is happening in frontier states and beyond. Girls cited programmes about health, AIDS, abuse, and women and children’s rights as most important.

Betty, 20, said that “they were learning from the radio that it was not acceptable to abuse girls and women and that they now had laws to protect them”. Before she had her radio, she didn’t know this. Given the rates of rape during the genocide and in the refugee camps, her comment is not surprising.

Boys also said that they want to listen to sports, to follow the national and international soccer teams and they liked agricultural and livestock programmes, citing Imbera Heza, a radio programme that the Freeplay Foundation funds on Radio Salus.

Today, thanks to your support, the children have a sense of hope – mainly from listening to President Kagame on the radio. They felt strongly that he had brought peace and stability to Rwanda and with that had comes development. They felt that before they had no future but now believe that he will lead them to a better one.