Home About
Since 1997
About
A non-governmental organisation serving the most deprived populations of Huye District, in Rwanda's Southern Province.
Our story
It began in Butare, in 1997
The Œuvre Humanitaire pour la Protection et le Développement de l’Enfant en Difficulté — OPDE Rwanda — was founded in 1997 in Butare by Father Bruno Nkonji.
For more than twenty years the organisation has worked with children living on the street. Some of these children are orphans, but many come from families so poor that they would rather take their chances on the street, hoping to find something better.
Street children are extremely vulnerable — girls especially, who are exposed to abuse and sexual violence. Time spent on the street leaves physical and psychological marks that last a lifetime. That is why OPDE chose to intervene upstream of the problem, at the level of extreme poverty itself.
Since September 2019, the organisation has run a prevention programme built on two pillars: the economic empowerment of women, and vocational training for out-of-school young people.
Our compass
Mission and vision
Mission
To protect the fundamental rights of vulnerable Rwandan children by integrating them into socio-economic life.
Vision
To enable a greater number of vulnerable children to leave precarious conditions behind and become actors in their country's development.
Our objectives
Five commitments that guide our work
Everything we do comes back to these objectives, set out when the organisation was founded and sharpened by nearly three decades in the field.
- 01 Work in the street to identify children at risk, accompany them through the process of reintegration into society, and favour their return to family — close or extended.
- 02 Meet the essential needs of orphans and other vulnerable children and protect their rights: safety, health, education.
- 03 Support vulnerable communities financially and materially, and work toward their economic self-sufficiency in order to limit the number of children at risk.
- 04 Use vocational training as a way of learning a trade, in order to reintegrate out-of-school vulnerable children socially and economically.
- 05 Prevent the street-children phenomenon through the empowerment of women and vocational training for out-of-school youth.
Since it was founded in 1997, OPDE Rwanda has supported more than 1,400 children and young adults. They have been reintegrated into the school system — primary, secondary, university and vocational training — and the majority have returned to their families.
Prevention
Extreme poverty here has a gender
Over the years OPDE carried out a number of street surveys to understand where the children were coming from and what lay at the source of the problem. Three particularly poor rural sectors of Huye District emerged: Mbazi, Ngoma and Mukura.
Visiting the children's families led to a single observation: almost all of them were headed by women alone. Whether widowed, single mothers or abandoned by their husbands, these women live the same reality — isolated, without support or resources, and unable to provide for their children.
In response, OPDE Rwanda and its partner L'AMIE Canada built a programme for the empowerment of women across those three sectors — addressing the root cause rather than its symptoms.
Partners
They make this work possible
Would you like to know more?
Write to our team — we will take your request in hand and reply as soon as we can.
Contact us