Award for group creating hope amid Burundi's political turmoil
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Version 0 of 1. For Deogratias Niyonkuru, hope fuels development. It may sound like idealistic whimsy, but Niyonkuru says defeating a widespread sense of fatalism allowed him to create a grassroots-driven model of empowerment in his native Burundi, now locked in crisis after weeks of protest and an attempted coup. This week Niyonkuru’s organisation Adisco was awarded the King Baudouin Foundation’s African Development Prize for its work in encouraging entrepreneurship and creating cooperatives and health insurance societies to give Burundians more financial independence. We help people shake off a feeling of fatalism … we help them think about ways of changing their situation While European leaders debate how much of their wealth to devote to aid, Niyonkuru sings from a different sheet – advocating self-sufficiency and an agenda that prioritises a sense of dignity. “The difference between us and [other organisations] is that we work to reinforce the population’s skills so they can take control of their own development,” said Niyonkuru, who was in Brussels this week to receive the foundation’s prize. “We help people shake off a feeling of fatalism ... we help them think about ways of changing their situation, to organise themselves, define their projects,” he said. Adisco helps people form small “groups of self-promotion and solidarity”, known as IGGs in the Kirundi language. They then mobilise local resources and decide on projects, usually agricultural schemes, to add value to the work they are doing. These groups later coalesce into cooperatives to gain greater influence. Related: Burundian refugees flee to Rwanda amid violence before polls – in pictures Adisco also runs health insurance schemes, trains young people to become leaders in their communities, and works to eradicate ethnic tensions between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis who fought a bloody 12-year civil war in the 1990s. In its citation, the King Baudouin Foundation said IGGs represented 17,100 households, accounting for around 97,000 people, in four hillside regions in Burundi. Around 25 health insurance groups cover more than 113,000 people. The idea of agency is important to Niyonkuru as it offers a sense of dignity to people who have endured years of paralysing uncertainty. “This sense of powerlessness ... is linked to poverty. People are so poor that they can’t see any way out ... this feeling was worsened by the war. When a person has lost everything again and again, they despair, and they see no reason to continue to invest because they do not know what will happen tomorrow,” he said. Some of the 90,000 people who have fled Burundi over the last month – since President Pierre Nkurunziza said he would stand for a third term, prompting protests and a short-lived attempted coup – said they would not return this time, having already fled the country during the civil conflict. Burundi is one of Africa’s poorest countries, ranking 180 out of 187 states in the 2014 UN human development index and it relies on foreign aid for about half of its national budget. Niyonkuru said humanitarian intervention had created a culture of hand-outs. “(After the war) around 40% of the population were living on humanitarian aid. They got healthcare for free, they got food for free, they got water for free ... Many people felt comfortable in this situation, and decided to wait for international aid to feed them, to give them seeds,” he said. This idea that things could be had for free had become a structural problem, Niyonkuru said. Adisco has limited external financial support, and mobilises local resources through subscription fees for the health schemes and the sale of shares in cooperatives, among other initiatives. “This is the only model that can allow a homegrown, durable development in Africa ... this model mobilises people around leaders who are chosen by the community and in whom they have confidence. It is rooted in African culture,” he said. However, Niyonkuru did see a role for the international community in Burundi’s current political crisis. “We need help so the different parties can negotiate to end these cycles of violence. The international community must absolutely use all methods to put pressure on all the parties – the government, civil society, the protesters and the opposition,” he said. “If the international community turns its back on Burundi at this time, the country will sink into violence and there will no possibility for development,” he said, adding that unemployed youths with few options were responsible for much of the current violence. “There are some who say, in Kirundi, ‘in any case, I am already dead’.” |