Clearly by James Chen

Author:James Chen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biteback Publishing Ltd

CHAPTER 10

A VISION FOR RWANDA

Sitting unobtrusively in KG599 Street in the Gasabo district of Kigali is a smart, gated house surrounded by trees and a pleasant garden.

It is in one of the quieter areas of this bustling capital of Rwanda and the home of Vision for a Nation, the charity I established five years ago with the unique aim of providing universal access to eye care and affordable glasses. We have pioneered a partnership with the national government to overcome big logistical challenges and deliver primary eye care to 2 million Rwandans – a sixth of the population – by the end of July 2017.

It is, as usual, a busy Monday morning as the staff here race to reach our goal of providing vision screening to all of the country’s 15,000 villages by the end of 2017.

The Clearly research team has come to visit. Mondays are ‘data review and field preparation day’. With country director Abdallah Uwihoreye orchestrating, the data specialists Pascal Umugwaneza and Chance Pascal are out on the terrace with the whole staff, reviewing with a large projector the screening performance results from all 502 health centres across the nation.

The ‘data dudes’, as the Pascals are affectionately called by outgoing boss Tom Rosewall, help us discover which centres are ‘on track’ to help us reach our goal and which are not.

This will enable the VFAN teams to plan their movements for the next four days – focusing primarily on visiting health centres that are not performing and getting them back on the right road.

You have to remember that the health centres – the administrators and nurses who are ultimately responsible for visiting each village in their catchment area – are the ones actually doing the work. They don’t work for VFAN, and are not on VFAN’s payroll. They work for the Ministry of Health. Our job is to nudge gently, and Monday morning is all about planning the nudging.

And it works!

On the face of it, Rwanda was one of the most unlikely places in the world to choose for the trailblazing work of VFAN.

The country’s relatively recent history is written in blood. The shadow of the government-sponsored genocide of the mid-1990s hangs over it. Those who survived can never forget it. Neither will the world.

In one of the worst horrors since the Second World War, almost 1 million ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by dominant Hutu forces in 100 days. Four hundred lives of men, women and children lost for every hour of the genocide.

The so-called Land of One Thousand Hills has fought back from those terrible times. Rwanda, a landlocked nation of 12 million people, is striving to rebuild its economy, with coffee and tea production among its main exports. The World Bank has praised Rwanda’s recent ‘remarkable development successes’, which it says have helped reduce poverty and inequality.

Paul Kagame has run Rwanda since his rebel army ended the slaughter in 1994. A 2007 statement by the President about his ‘vision’ for his country is emblazoned on one of the walls in the VFAN headquarters.

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