Child Sponsor Rwanda

Rwanda with its population of just under eleven million is situated just south of the Equator, and is bordered by Uganda to its north, Tanzania to its east, Burundi to its south and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to its west. It gained independence from Belgium in 1962 amid simmering tensions between its mainly Hutu and Tutsi populations that erupted into a full scale genocide in 1994 killing over a million of its citizens including three out of every four Tutsi, including women and children. One of the major problems in Rwanda is the aftermath of this genocide which left around one hundred thousand children working on the land to achieve some form of living without adults around them to guide and assist or free them up so they can attend any form of education, so vital to their future.

It is estimated that one out of every five children in Rwanda is either an orphan or has been abandoned, one of the world's highest percentages of orphans. Compounding this is the half million girls who were systematically raped pushing up levels of AIDS infection cascading down to their infected newborns. Child sponsor programs in Rwanda work with these orphaned or abandoned children, promoting access to education in a country which has one of the lowest secondary education attendance in the world (35.87 % in 2018), addressing food insecurity and safe water issues as well as addressing the deep psychological issues of parents to today's children given 60% of them stated that they do not care if they ever grew up because of the traumas of the genocide past. You can make a difference when you sponsor a child in Rwanda.