"The Komera Project provides scholarships to qualified girls in Rwinkwavu, Rwanda who lack the resources necessary to complete secondary school. Komera Scholars attend existing local boarding secondary schools in Rwanda. Our comprehensive scholarships include tuition, uniforms, health insurance, travel expenses, feminine hygiene products, books, pens and pencils, notebooks, mattresses, and sheets."
"As girls continue their education, they improve their earning potential, their health and their sense of self-worth enabling them to break the bonds of poverty."
“You will never break the cycle of poverty or disease without educating girls. It won’t happen”
-Paul Farmer, Founder, Partners in Health
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"What Gretchen (Gretchen Steidle Wallace, the founder of Global Grassroots) discovered in that visit to South Africa, was that women and girls in grassroots communities throughout the country already knew what they needed to do to protect themselves from contracting HIV. But they did not have the economic freedom, sexual rights or personal voice to decide when, where, how and with whom to have sex."
"In Rwanda, nearly 1 million people were killed in 100 days during the 1994 genocide. The UN estimates that 250,000 - 500,000 women were also raped, many by known HIV infected men. At the end of the genocide, the government estimated women made up 70% of the population, left to assume the roles of men in heading households, rebuilding lives, caring for orphans and trying to heal from trauma, grief and physical wounds. It is among these same marginalized women that Gretchen found extraordinary courage, steadfast resolve and legitimate solutions to advance social change for women."
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Education = Earning potential + Self-Worth
Earning potential = More career choices + Independence + Better use of family money
Self-Worth = Independence + Strength + Health
When I was studying abroad in Rwanda and Uganda in the spring of 2010 I noticed the unbelievable strength of the women. In Uganda, the women in the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps rethatched the houses, tended to gardens, found food, raised the children, kept their lives going while the men succumbed to drinking and depression after the peak of the LRA violence. In Rwanda, there was a disproportionate number of women after the 1994 genocide. Today, the women are the ones who are working hardest towards real reconciliation. We visited villages where women's collectives had been formed where wives of perpetrators and wives of victims worked together to produce soap and other goods. Women are peacekeepers; Women are survivors, forgotten victims; Women are healers.
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