Kolping Rwanda is on the road to success. Membership has doubled in the past two years. There are now 94 Kolping Families with 4,549 members. One of the major concerns in Rwanda is providing effective training in the cultivation of land including the use of fertilizers and seeds as well as the sale and processing of the harvested crops.
Executive director Dancille Mujawamariya is more than satisfied: “Our members were able to increase their harvests threefold and sometimes even fourfold!“ The land prepared and used by members together plays an important role in that respect: The seeds are grown there and then distributed among individual members. There are even more community fields than there are Kolping Families. This shows how much Kolping Families use those fields to improve the yields on their own fields. Here is another success story: The administration in the villages specifically asks Kolping to act as multipliers. They provide Kolping Families with seeds to train their neighbours. Last year more than 15,000 people attended one or more training courses, passing on Kolping know-how to many people outside of Kolping and contributing to a reduction of poverty.
At the same time, all Kolping Families are also organized in savings groups. On the basis of grants or individual savings, micro-credits are granted to group members. By the way: more than half of those starting a business have an additional income outside of agriculture and are therefore less dependent on weather conditions and climate change.
