Happy holidays from the ROP!

As we approach the end of the Rwandan Orphans Project’s 10^th year we are excited to tell you about the achievements we have had in 2018 at our Imizi Children’s Center. We want you to know that this year ROP helped more vulnerable children than ever before, with more than 290 boys and girls benefiting from the opportunities and services offered to them at Imizi.

With your help in 2018 we’ve been able to:

Provide 90 boys and 20 girls with housing, fulltime care, counseling, healthcare, and activities to help them grow and thrive
Offer more than 150 vulnerable children completely free, quality primary education at our Imizi Primary School
Support 26 former resident children with school costs after they were reunited with their families

Pay tuition and school material costs so 32 Imizi children could attend secondary school or technical-vocational training
Pay registration fees for 8 Imizi graduates who earned themselves scholarships to university after completing school with our support
Hire two new caretakers and one new teacher, bringing our total number of Imizi staff - who are all Rwandan - to 26

If you ever wonder what impact your support has had on the lives of Rwanda’s vulnerable youth, just have a look at these statistics from a recent survey we conducted with a large group of ROP graduates:

76% are employed full time (18% self-employed)
65% are renting or buying their own home
72% earn a salary higher than the national average
85% have health insurance
25% are married
81% are happy with their current careers

When asked who or what had greatest impact on their lives, 98% said that it was the experiences and opportunities ROP provided them at Imizi that transformed their lives

We are proud of these responses to our survey, and we hope you are too – without your support we would not be able to provide our children with these opportunities.

We had several achievements throughout the year, but the biggest was the successful completion of our pilot Imizi Girls Home. Our partner, the Segal Family Foundation, was impressed with our new program, and they have chosen to help ROP expand the girls home to provide care for up 20 former street girls in 2019. As we speak, a group of new girls are settling in with the help of our social workers and housemothers, just in time to spend Christmas with their new brothers and sisters at Imizi and start changing their lives.

Our other achievements include

Once again Imizi’s Primary 6 class earned itself a 100% passing rate, a stand out statistic among schools in our region and a testament to the hard work our students and teachers put in each and every day
For the second consecutive year we organized more workshops and trainings for children and their parents, as well as for families from our community, than we had the previous year.
We completed construction of our brand new, environmentally friendly eco-toilet facilities with help from our friends at KLM's Wings of Support and some generous donors from Colorado. These new toilets allow us to convert all of our waste to fertilizer, some of which will be used for agriculture at Imizi while the rest of it will be donated to local families to support their own food production.
Our primary school received many new and much needed upgrades, including new roofing, comfortable new desks for the students, a new sidewalk, and a colorful paint job.
We were able to purchase additional land that bordered Imizi, and we have been using it to grow vegetables for our children and grass for our animals, saving us money and teaching our kids agriculture in the process.

We have big plans for 2019 – including providing more secondary school scholarships for older girls, offering more support for our graduates to help them start their own businesses, and providing lunch to our day students, many of whom do not get a proper meal each day – and we hope to share these successes with you throughout next year.

Thank you!

We couldn’t do any of this without your support, and we hope you take as much pride in our successes as we do. As a small, grassroots charity with little large-scale funding support, we rely on your generous support throughout the year. If you are able to support our work again as we begin the new year, please visit our website or email us and we'll be happy to tell you how you can help.

Best wishes to you and yours this holiday season,

Sean Jones
Executive Director
Rwandan Orphans Project - Imizi Children's Center

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