US academics ‘amazed’ at Rwanda’s transformation

A visiting group of American researchers and teachers says it has been stunned by Rwanda’s transformation process following the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. Julie Kennedy, a research fellow at the Social Equity Venture Fund (SEVEN), said the country’s progress over the past 17 years offered important lessons to the rest of the world. She was speaking yesterday, after a tour of Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, with a delegation of eight teachers from the US where they paid respect to the over 250,000 Genocide victims who are buried there. “We have a group of teachers who are travelling with us in this country for ten days to learn about Rwanda’s history, most especially how the country has transformed itself into a model of economic development for other countries in the world,” she stated. SEVEN is an American virtual, non-profit entity, run by entrepreneurs whose strategy is to markedly increase the rate of innovation and diffusion of enterprise-based solutions to poverty. Michael Fairbanks, a member of Rwanda’s Presidential Advisory Council (PAC), co-founded the SEVEN Fund in 2005. The SEVEN Fund is a philanthropic foundation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts in USA. Kennedy said she had been to Rwanda three times before, in 2004, 2006, 2009, but she is amazed at the country’s incredible development pace. “We are also interested in learning about the country’s education system; we are going to visit schools, hospitals, public and private sectors in order to know more about Rwanda,” she explained. Kennedy said that the memorial centre is “very touching”, adding that the delegation found it important for lessons about the Genocide, and how to prevent similar catastrophes in thefuture. “All of us want to learn what happened in this country, and how the International Community failed to prevent and stop the Genocide,” she noted.“It’s a big lesson for us to work together not to let this happen again anywhere”. Ends