Pilot Light is honored to partner, once again, with the Millenium Villages Project/Rwanda (MVP), started by economist and Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, in giving a microloan to a womens group that is starting a pig cooperative in Mayange, Rwanda, the same village where the Canteen Cooperative is located. This group of 60 women, ranging in age from 20-65, started walking together as a form of exercise. They found their time together very theraputic, as they all started sharing their problems and their stories of their lives, in general, as African women and of their emotional scars. Many of these women are widows from the genocide and all lived through it.  They decided that they needed a cooperative to address some of the money issues and it was concluded that there was a significant demand for pigs to sell in the city, as well as at the nearby military barracks. The plan is that they will divide into groups to take on the work in periods, they have chosen a treasurer, will hire a night watchman and open a bank account. They have identified a plot of land that can be used to keep the pigs. With the profits from the pig sales, the women plan to invest in tents, chairs, tables, etc. that they can rent out for parties and other events. They want to give small loans to cooperative members to be trained in trades and also want to help members in need to send their children to school. This group is very organized and has the support of the staff of the Millennium Villages Project to help them create a budget and guide them through the initial steps.


Mayange is located in southeast of Rwanda in Bugesera district. Bugesera District is a region long home to suffering. Beginning in the late 1950s, when thousands were forcibly relocated to the area, and continuing with sporadic massacres throughout the next decades, the upheaval culminated in the 1994 genocide. During that three-month period, over 60% of the population was brutally killed. Mayange, a sector currently home to over 25,000 people, was an epicenter of the violence. Fourteen years after the genocide, the area continues to suffer. Once forested and home to cattle herding, Mayange turned to shambles. When the area began to face persistent water problems in the 1960s, farmers turned to cutting down trees to produce charcoal for sale in the capital. By the 1980s, environmental mismanagement led to deforestation and the ecological plight that typifies the region today: soil erosion, decreased and erratic rainfall, and periods of drought and famine. Mayange is now one of the poorest regions in one of the poorest countries of the world. Most people struggle to subsist on agricultural plots one half hectare in size, unable to sustain a family’s basic food requirements.

After 1994, Mayange received thousands of 1959 returnees and the government, with the help of donors, built thousands of houses for these returnees, genocide survivors and other vulnerable people. Genocide perpetrators, genocide survivors, and 1959 returnees all been placed together in the settlements, as part of a reconciliation and unity plan put in place after the 1994 genocide.


Budget: Funded