Main aim of the charity

Our aim is to empower our community all our projects are centered on a motto called Heal to Empower with an excellent approach to the community and gives them hope to trust again; it provides a platform for the youth and women to discuss peacebuilding and poverty eradication through entrepreneurship. We aim to empower women cooperatives and youth with hands-on skills to thrive and rise in this world. We know that for them to thrive and advance, the first thing they need is to get healed and live beyond the pain that they faced. We have started registration of Ikivi Foundation as a non-profit organization in Rwanda, however, all our cooperatives are registered as a social enterprises. We usually sign MoU with stakeholders and ensure full ownership of the project for beneficiaries. We have board of advisers and I have influenced seven youths as members of the organization, all of us have full-time jobs in most of the leading organizations, we, therefore, make sure to contribute 10% of our salary to provide incentives for two staff who work closely with those cooperative on the field. This strategy supports most importantly reduction of operation costs and makes sure that 99% of the fund we received go to beneficiaries.

How the employee got involved and why

Rwanda faced the Genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 which decimated the country, more than a million people were killed, because of ethnic division. At the age of 12 years I started my journey, I was surrounded by community members who are emotionally and psychologically wounded due to the 1994 genocide against Tutsi that left communities in unspeakable trauma and excruciating invisible wounds. Unsurprisingly, women were most likely to fall in this category. then I decided to commit and bring change using dialogue among youth and make Painting for peacebuilding, after my university I chose to keep my social work and I initiated Ikivi Foundation, with limited resource in 2017, We successfully visited 157 families, 87 written stories and 16 audio stories and then brought them together for peacebuilding, unit, and reconciliation. In 2018, we got the market for the first cooperative we started with by selling handcraft bags on international market. In 2019, we secured our second market for our handcraft cooperative to provide packaging for a chocolate company where a woman could make one box in 15 minutes and a minimum of 40 boxes per day; for one box, she earned 100 Rwf that means 4000 Rwf per day equal to 4USD.

What work does the employee do for charity

I have an initiative called Ikivi Foundation with a mission of poverty eradication through women empowerment and peacebuilding among Rwandans, we believe that you can’t tackle poverty while you have no internal peace. Our targeted group included women who had survived the Genocide and those who had direct family members, especially spouses, who participated in the crimes of Genocide against Tutsi and are serving their prison terms. 60% of those women suffered from mental health issues, and on prescribed medication, we also realized that 34% of them were living in extreme poverty and needed assistance to lift their families out of poverty, so we chose to train them about Entrepreneurship to become self-reliant. Now, we have three women cooperatives that are involved in agriculture, and handcraft making, including but not limited to bags and peper packaging.