Mayange, Rwanda
Population |
20000 |
Villages |
4 |
The Millennium Village cluster in Rwanda is located in Mayange, a sector of Bugesera District located about 40 km south of the capital, Kigali. In a country known as the “pays des milles collines” (“land of 1,000 hills”), the terrain around Mayange is flatter and drier than most of Rwanda. The area suffers from sporadic rainfall and declining soil fertility, leading to endemic poverty, illness and a lack of economic opportunity. The project began working with an initial 5,000 people in Kagenge, one of Mayange’s five subdivisions in early 2006. The population was facing impending famine because of failing rains and a poor harvest the year before, and the health center was severely lacking in staff, medicines, equipment and supplies, and had no electricity or running water.
Unlike most of rural Rwanda, where individual homesteads are scattered across the hilly landscape, Mayange has several umudugudus, or settlements, of closely spaced dwellings, which the government built to house returnees after the 1994 genocide. Nearly 14 years after the genocide, Bugesera and Rwanda as a whole are intently focused on rebuilding and reconciliation.
Village Characteristics by Sector

Declining rainfall over the past five years has made productive agriculture challenging. Following a drought in 2005, when the project arrived in January 2006 the team worked with UNICEF and the World Food Programme to facilitate the establishment of an emergency feeding center for severely malnourished mothers and children.

When the Millennium Villages project began, Mayange Health Center was attempting to serve the local population despite having inadequate nursing staff and virtually no medicines or equipment, as well as no running water or electricity, even though power lines passed a few hundred meters away. HIV prevalence was estimated to be the highest in the nation at 13% (though the government has since revised those figures down into single digits). At the time nearly one in five children died before age 5. At the beginning of the project, Mayange Health Center, with a catchment of roughly 25,000 people, was seeing fewer than 750 patients a month. With simple, cost-effective interventions, Mayange Health Center which had 6,146 total outpatient visitors in all of 2005 consulted over 4,000 outpatients in just one month. All of this is helping to dramatically reduce under-5 mortality, ensuring healthy mothers are delivering healthy babies, and reversing the impact of limited access to care.

Primary schools are overcrowded, with classes as big as 80 children; the teachers lack books, supplies and training. The costs associated with secondary education are such that most parents are unable to pay for their children to attend school past the primary level.

The lack of accessible drinking water forced villagers to spend hours each day retrieving what their family needed to survive. This time-consuming process diverts effort from other important activities, such as education and farming.
Intervention Highlights
In addition to the many programs in agriculture, education health and infrastructure, many women are undertaking additional income-generating activities such as basket weaving. The Imasirire (sunrise) basket weaving cooperative comprises more than 200 women who are learning basket weaving and business techniques, leading to additional income for their families. The project is also helping the community access microcredit. Speaking to the tremendous success of the MVP in Mayange, the Government of Rwanda has announced plans to scale the Millennium Villages project to all 30 districts under its Vision 2020-Umurenge initiative, part of the national development strategy that is taking the project to unprecedented scale.
|