Wednesday 10 feb

The reason I have not been writing that much the last couple of days is that I have been spending all my spare time (when I’ve not been at work or socialising) reading a very interesting book that I’ve borrowed and need to finish as soon as possible. It’s called “Shake Hands With the Devil” by Roméo Dallaire. I really recommend it to anybody who is interested in the genocide and hasn’t already read it. I’m totally captured by it and if I could I would just stay home and read it all day long. Some other people that I’ve talked to think that it’s too detailed and slow moving so I guess it’s not for everyone. I love it though!

There have been some interesting things happening at work this week. I’ve been attending two meetings today. The first one was at the National Election Committee (NEC) with the Technical Committee of the Basket Fund, which my supervisor at Sida is co-chairing. We are the biggest contributor to this fund but there are several other donors involved. I really enjoyed the meeting since it was much more efficient than they normally tend to be here. We were mostly discussing and adopting different documents like an evaluation report, the financial report etc. This might sound very boring but when you’re new you really learn a lot by hearing comments on these types of documents. It was also the first time I met the people at NEC that we’re working with and it’s always interesting to meet people and form an opinion about how things work. I was quite impressed by the professionalism and openness of the NEC representatives. We did also decide that we will do a couple of field visits during the coming month in order to get a chance to see NEC at work. A visit to the NEC office in Kigali where they are busy registering voters right now (for the upcoming presidential election) is planned as well as a visit to local community centre where they train the staff in how to conduct themselves during the elections. Exciting!

The other meeting I attended was with a civil society organisation called Legal Aid Forum (LAF) which works with information and access to justice issues for the poor rural part of the population. It’s an umbrella organisation that comprise of over 30 different organisations that are active in this field in Rwanda. It was a really interesting meeting where they introduced their organisation and what they do. From Sida’s perspective this is an important human rights issue and we might consider funding a project in this field in the future.

Tomorrow we will start working on the new sub-strategy for the governance field for Rwanda and Burundi. This is finally possible since the new country strategy for Rwanda and Burundi was approved by the government just last week. We don’t know exactly what’s in it since we haven’t received the final version yet but we will at least start discussing possible new projects within the governance team. This should be a very interesting process that I am very excited to be a part of! Another interesting process that I will be a part of is the assessment of a new project. This is the preparatory work that takes place before the approval of a new project. First there is normally a request from the initiator of the project which sends a proposal. We then go through it and normally suggest changes or improvements before we submit an assessment memo to the head quarters in Stockholm who makes the actual decision if we are to support the project or not. There are several different well specified criteria that need to be fulfilled before it can be accepted that we must take into consideration. The project in question is whether or not to support the work of the Gender Monitoring Office (GMO) which is a government initiated institution. I think this is a very interesting field, especially in Rwanda, which has a very ambitious gender equality policy.