Let's get down to business

So we came to Africa with a purpose, aside from the opportunity to live and travel in Africa, the primary reason we are here is to volunteer. Out of the six months we are away, four of them we will spend volunteering - two months in Rwanda and two months in Uganda. We have now officially been in our role at FVA for nearly three weeks. Like any new job there is always a settling in period and these first few weeks have bought many challenges.  We came over here knowing and expecting things to be completely different from back home and they but nothing could have prepared us for the disorganization, lack of structure, planning and processes within the organization and its programmes. The programme we signed up to work on was the Gender Based Violence Programme (GBV). Our role would be to assist in the delivery of the programmes which included providing counseling to women and their children, facilitating group discussions around GBV, income generating activities, vocational skill training and literacy improvement. What looked and sounded good on paper turned out to be completely different from what is actually being delivered. At best you could say that some of these activities were being attempted to be provided. For the first week we went with the flow however the question we soon found ourselves asking was "what is going to be the most effective use of our time here". After speaking with some other organizations and meeting with FVA management we made the decision to refocus our time to programme planning, project logic models, project evaluation and capacity building within FVA and their current programmes. Our main focus initially is on planning and resource development for the GBV progamme. There are many health and social service NGOs around Kigali but there is very little networking or awareness among organizations and the community as to what services are available and how to access them, instead everyone works in silos with the limited resources they have. One of the tasks we have been working on is to identify and connect FVA with other organizations in the area that FVA can refer women too. We are in the process of meeting with organizations that provide counseling, micro-financing for small business ventures, literacy and vocational skills training and women’s cooperatives. This in itself has been a slow and frustrating process with meetings being cancelled or postponed at the last minute. We will also be visiting the other FVA programmes to document what is currently in place and assist with evaluation look at ways resources could be better used or improvements made. So although our time here will be spent very differently to what we had planned, we hope that leaving behind some plans for the organization, connecting the women to a variety of services, and setting some goals for the programmes will leave a more lasting impression after we have moved on.