Lausanne World Pulse – Urban Articles – Development with the Poor in Kigali: Child-headed Households in a Post-Genocide Context

By Julia M. Smith-Brake

Kigali is the capital of Rwanda and is located in the centre of the country. Rwanda is still largely rural, with the majority of its population involved in subsistence agriculture. Kigali has a population of less than one million, approximately one-tenth of Rwanda’s total population. It is estimated that the average household size is five people, and fifty-six percent of Kigali’s population is under the age of twenty.¹

Also, because population growth has been incredibly high over the past two decades, especially in the years since the end of the genocide, the government and other social agencies have been unable to keep up with the growth in terms of infrastructure. The city lacks adequate social facilities such as schools and health clinics, water supply, power provision, and sewage and sewerage services; there is not enough housing and so slums have sprung up in many parts of the city. According to MINALOC, “In addition, the urban market status does not support the rural-urban influx and results in a severe unemployment crisis. In search for alternatives, many people are forced into criminal activities.”

Factors in Understanding Development in Rwanda
Any discussion about development in Rwanda, and about development in most of the Developing World, must also include an understanding of the AIDS crisis. Like the genocide, AIDS affects every person in Rwanda. Everyone knows someone who has AIDS or who has died of AIDS; many people have a family member with AIDS. AIDS preys on the most productive members of society, those between fifteen and forty years of age. This strips a country of its teachers, doctors, civil servants, agricultural labourers, etc., and makes the task development incredibly difficult, because people are generally striving for survival and have little time or energy to give to development projects and initiatives.

A consequence of both the genocide and the AIDS pandemic is the creation of a the child-headed household.

Another consequence of both the genocide and the AIDS pandemic is the creation of a new family unit: the child-headed household. A common definition of a child-headed household is “when a child/children take over as the head of their household and fend for themselves without any adults to look after them.”²

Traditionally, when one or both parents die, other members of the extended family and community take responsibility of the orphaned children. However, the genocide claimed over a million Rwandan lives in 1994 and the number of deaths due to AIDS since that time is in the hundreds of thousands. According to ACORD,

The growing number of children left without parents … means that often families can’t cope with more children as they don’t have enough money, especially if an adult in that household also died from HIV/AIDS, [leaving the family] with less income….Child-headed households are a growing problem because children have no one looking out for them and are therefore vulnerable. They often have to drop out of school to work and have to worry about where their next meal is coming from. Children can be treated badly by others they go to for support because they have no economic or physical power and people might look down on them for being the children of AIDS victims.³

Girls are more at risk because they are seen as more easily taken advantage of. They are forced to exchange sexual favours for food, clothing, and, ironically, hygiene products. Members of the extended family often force child-headed families out of their houses, leaving them homeless and penniless. There is rarely anyone who will stand up for these children who are abused and taken advantage of.

Julia M. Smith-Brake and her husband live in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, working in prevention and aftercare research and implementation for sexually exploited children. Smith-Brake did a summer internship in Rwanda with Canadian Baptist Ministries. Since graduating, she has been doing contract work for a Canadian NGO, Urban Youth Adventures, which aims to end child and youth poverty in the poorest neighborhoods of Winnipeg, and a Toronto-based company, Winning Kids Inc., a consultation firm that helps organizations implement child abuse prevention policies.