Mayange has only one health center for 25,000 people and 70 health workers. 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.