Speaking on 31st May 2018 at King’s College London, Dr Nicola Palmer, Dr Felix Ndahinda and Dr Richard Benda discuss the impact the two-day conference (Rwandan Perspectives on Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Sustainable Peace: Enhancing Research, Influencing Policy) which had just finished there where Aegis’ funded researchers had made keynote presentations.
In an interview with Stanford GSB Professor Renee Bowen, President Paul Kagame discusses leading Rwanda through economic and social growth over the 20 years since the 1994 genocide.
Traditionally, Rwandan women like Epiphanie Mukamurenzi would be confined to domestic chores, with her husband in charge of anything concerned with household income. Now the Rwandan Government- with support from the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) – is empowering women like Epiphanie to be equally involved in the management of their family’s finances, creating a new gender equality model for the country.
This documentary is on stories of rescue during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda against the Tutsi.
This short film introduces the peacebuilding education programme created in Rwanda by the Aegis Trust for genocide prevention.
This is a documentary on the root causes of genocide, division and dehumanisation. The interviewees share with us what happened before the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi; the beliefs brought in by Belgiums on the origin of Hutus, Tutsi and Twa, other massacres that targeted the Tutsis in prior years, how they fled the country, lived as refugees in neighbouring countries and their plight in 1994.
Nicholas Aru Maan – co-founder of the South Sudan Youth, Peace and Development Organisation (SSYPADO) paid a visit to the UK’s National Holocaust Centre, birthplace of the Aegis Trust, and gave an on-camera interview about the life-saving impact of partnership with Aegis. “Aegis Trust and the Kigali Memorial Centre has been the force behind our continued hope for peacebuilding in South Sudan,” Nicholas says, describing how South Sudanese chiefs inspired by Aegis’ work in Rwanda had helped to reduce conflict by organizing young people to take part in education rather than fighting.
Holocaust survivors have joined MPs to back a move to open an atrocity prevention centre at the new national Holocaust Memorial being built in Westminster. Martin Stern, a Terezin camp survivor, stressed the need for the new memorial in the shadow of Parliament to commemorate modern-day atrocities such as those in Rwanda and Bosnia, as well recording the slaughter of six million Jews in the Shoah.
One of our programmes include an annual summer course. Last year we had one on “Genocide and mass atrocities”. The course was seen as an intersection of theory and practice, history and the present, where contemporary issues, responses and challenges of dealing with genocide and its effects were deliberated about in depth. Participants were from across the region and this allowed for a comparative and pluralistic discussion.
On March 31st 2015, Aegis Trust officially launched the Research, Policy and Higher Education Department (RPHE) with the goal of informing policy practice with the best research evidence in Rwanda. With the department’s projects like commissioning research, Rwandan researchers will benefit from the resources to be granted; and will disseminate their findings to wider audiences. In return, policy makers will gain from the new set of evidence produced when formulating policy.
We organized a capacity building workshop on “Publishing strategies and connecting research to policy and media”, with an aim of offering Rwandan researchers practical knowledge on how to link their findings to wider audiences. The participants shared their experiences and the challenges involved in conducting policy relevant research and how to overcome them.