Interview with our piloting partner — Hope of Family
We are excited to bring you an interview with the Aimable Mpayimana, founder and legal representative of Hope of Family, one of our piloting partners. They provide wrap around support to families with primary school aged children that live in the southern province of rural Rwanda.
Their vision: to reduce extreme family poverty through efficient childhood education, which means promoting parental involvement in education. They focus on targeting low income families (selected with the local administration) for two years to encourage parents about the importance of school.
This increases the likelihood of academic success, which can remove the cycle of poverty and allow individuals to support themselves and their families.
Their motto: direct, wrap around assistance.
Local volunteers work with families directly to create a co-operative and sustainable project where all aspects of assistance are considered with individualised concerns that are re-evaluated when needed.
Hope of Family operates in 4 main areas.
1. Health and sanitation
Chronic poverty is the root of many health problems and school attendance is often impacted by sickness, which negatively affects school performance. Hope of Family helps provide mutual health insurance which can remove this barrier to education.
2. Family support
This includes providing arable land that can be rented, animal husbandry
support or literacy encouragement; which improves families’ living conditions.
3. Support for children’s education
This is done through involving their parents, encouraging teachers to cater for all students and providing school equipment.
4. Parental coaching
In effective parent teacher communication to encourage and track academic success but also in agriculture, hygiene and sanitation.
Aimable’s key message:
Both a children’s school and home environment go hand in hand to attain
a family’s hope. Different opportunities have to be combined in order to train families so that they can live a decent socio-economic life and are able to get involved in their children’s education.
On a journey to success
They have had major successes, with 100 families supported in 2 years, 466 adults at a community literacy school, 137 children receiving a school materials package and 1465 family members receiving mutual health insurance. They also received 7th rank out of 60 in their district administration’s NGO’s participants, and their donation was increased by 15% due to their team being so impactful!
It all began with Aimable’s idea in 2015, with Hope of Family’s foundational philosophy and theory of change based on his personal background. He was raised by a single mum who was socio-economically struggling. He knew that it is easier for a socio-economically capable family to get involved in their children’s education, where his mum couldn’t due to being busy. However, he was convicted that low income parents should be holistically supported to look after their needs and support their children’s education. Home environments should be conducive to a child’s performance in schooling.
He wanted to create a cheap roll out but significantly impactful project, and Hope of Family began in 2016 after receiving funding from Running Chicken, a US based organisation. They piloted with 5 families, headed by widows, which had tremendous results in their children’s academic performance and socioeconomic life. It was so successful that funding was increased to reach 100 families!
A significant shift can also be found in their baseline (2018) and midline (2019) surveys (see full report here) where 95% of parents visited their children at school, 100% now take initiatives in their children’s education (from 20%), 70% now use the community library (up from 0%) and 100% now have livestock (from 40%). 410 people who live next to the beneficiaries’ zone have also been encouraged to participate in cooperatives which shows the long reaching effects of Hope of Family.
Lack of funding is setting limits
However, one of the biggest challenges is funding due to the large number of potential beneficiaries, which would scale the project up. Other plans such as paving beneficiaries’ homes, instead of having dirty floors that are potential beds for parasites and disease, and enriching local resources such as libraries, require funding. They are also developing interactive video modules; however, they do not have computers for these to be used. Similarly, many beneficiaries do not have phones so SMS cannot be used to monitor and evaluate the system which makes it more laborious for volunteers. They also wish to build a strong network of different organizations for staff training.
Despite these issues we are proud that Hope of Family echo’s We Encourage’s values of transparency and accountability. They operate on a reasonable budget and directly direct funds from donors to beneficiaries through community volunteers to respond to wrap around needs. We look forward to working with them closely in the future.
Interview done by Emily Stamp
