In 2009, a group of women in Kirehe, Rwanda, began meeting together. All of them had lost their husbands, but the reason behind their husbands’ absence couldn’t have been more vastly different. Some had lost their husbands as victims of the Rwandan genocide 15 years earlier; others had husbands serving prison sentences as perpetrators of the genocide’s violence. At a time when great fear and hatred existed between ethnic groups, the women’s act of gathering together across ethnic lines was revolutionary.

When their church introduced the savings group program through HOPE International in 2011, the women decided to start saving together, naming their group Abavandimwe, an affectionate Kinyarwandan term for “siblings.” Continue Reading…