Friday, 23 Nov 2012

So yesterday 2 of our friends from Kigali (well 1 is actually from America and the other from South Africa lol) came to good ol' Muhanga and stayed with us here at Azizi. Justine also came over and we all headed to Splendid for dinner and then back home to watch a movie on our awesome projector that my parents and grandma sent me via our CCA Colleague (thank you again!). We watched "What to Expect When You're Expecting", which was really cute/funny. Always so nice to have friends come over and hang out here with us, it doesn't happen as much as it should!

Today was a typical day at work, nothing crazy exciting happened aside from the usual. Although, I did meet with Fresnel on Wednesday of this week and we thorough discuss my workplan for the remainder of my internship here, so now I have a much clearer idea of how to approach and get started on the work I will be carrying out over the coming few months. Feels really nice knowing how to move forward on things and to have a clear idea as to when things will be taking place and how - exciting!

It definitely looks as though I will probably have to extend my internship by another 3 months though if I have any hope of accomplishing the items on my task list. It's not that I have a long task list, but the tasks that I do have are quite large in capacity and will take a while to carry out - especially when there's 15 co-operatives involved! Here's what I've got ahead of me:

• Market Research on Financial Tools available for co-operatives
• Market Research on activities and options available for equal participation of men and women throughout the agriculture value chain of their co-operative
• Help to draft questions for the Project Baseline Study and assist in the execution and analysis of the Baseline
• Conduct value chain mapping for each of the 15 co-operatives
• Research and suggest income diversification options for the co-operative members 

So yes, really interesting stuff ahead, but very limited time to complete it - so we'll see what ends up happening :-)

I didn't share these press releases on my blog yet, so here are the official communique's from CCA and the Co-operative Development Foundation of Canada (CDF) on the project I am working on here in Rwanda:

• CCA Communique
• CDF Communique

So that's that! This weekend Joyce and I will be joining Justine and Leah in Kibuye, a town about 2hrs away from Muhanga located on Lake Kivu. This will be our second time visiting Lake Kivu (Gisenyi was the first), so should be really nice! We'll be camping on an island just off the shore of Kibuye called Amahoro (Peace) Island. Our bus leaves at 7am sharp tomorrow - the latest bus possible tomorrow morning because of Umuganda. So we'll be in Kibuye by 9am, giving us tons of time to enjoy the town and make it to the island. Should definitely make for a nice, relaxing weekend - will post pics upon return, of course :-)