The wife of the visiting Vice President of India, Mrs. Salma Ansari, has commended Rwanda’s approach of setting up Isange One Stop Centres to support the vulnerable victims of gender-based violence and child abuse.

While visiting the main Isange centre at Kacyiru District hospital on Monday, where she was given an insight into the idea behind its establishment and services offered, Mrs Ansari said that although India has almost a similar set-up, there’s a lot to learn from Rwanda’s model.

Mrs. Ansari is in the country accompanying her husband and the Vice-President of India, Shri M Hamid Ansari, on a three-day visit.

"We have such centres in India, but it’s always better to have new inputs…it is always nice to learn from best practices… something new, which can also be very useful to us,” Ansari said.

"This Isange One Stop Centre) is a very impressive centre; how women are given care in times of crisis…looking into it in every detail; this is very inductive as a whole,” she added.

She hastened to add that the mental, emotional and physical crisis that victims of GBV and child abuse pass through necessitates best approach to rehabilitate the affected, and that Isange Stop Centre stands out in that regard.

This, she underscored, is a great achievement worth learning from.

Isange, which started in 2009 as a pilot project, offers free psycho-socio, medical, legal and counseling services to victims of GBV and child abuse.

Under its scale-up programme, Isange is so far active in at least 28 hospitals across.

Supt. Shafiga Murebwayire, the coordinator of Isange centres, said: "We do a lot of things to ensure that a victim gets all the required services. We give them medical services through which we also get evidence to strengthen the judicial process against the culprit, and give them counseling to ensure that a victim is fully rehabilitated and gets justice.”

Isange, loosely translated as ‘feel at home’, is run by Rwanda National Police in partnership with the ministries of Health, and Gender and Family Promotion, with the support of Imbuto Foundation, among other partners.

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