Berwa Kinunu Background

Equipping single teen mothers with the necessary life and technical skills. The rate of teenage pregnancy remains unacceptably high in most developing countries. In Rwanda, studies show a rapid increase over the past two decades despite the political achievements of women's empowerment, and efforts to curtail child sexual abuse. According to studies, around 50 % of pregnancies are unintended every year. These pregnancies lead to problems such as children growing up without fathers, single mothers, girls dropping out of school, stigmatization in the community, and consequently a cycle of poverty. According to studies, single mothers become mothers in their teen years, while they are exercising experimental sex. In many cases, their partners are children themselves which might explain their lack of involvement in the child’s life. However, there are other cases where girls and women are raped or involved in transactional sex for survival. Within Kinunu Catholic Parish ( Nyundo Diocese) in Rutsiro District, western Province, an area covering administrative sectors of Boneza, Musasa, Mushonyi and Ruhango more than 300 single mothers have been identified in the year 2019, and the number has increased due to COVID-19 pandemic which led to the suspension of schools for almost one year, thus inducing young teenagers lead an unstructured and unsupervised lifestyle. Within its pastoral apostolate to the youth, Kinunu Catholic Parish has designed a program called “Berwa-Kinunu” which aims at equipping single mothers with the necessary life and technical skills and support to care for themselves and their children. Through the provision of training in tailoring, childcare, and psychosocial counseling and advocacy within the community, Berwa-Kinunu intervention is directly contributing to alleviating poverty among single mothers of Boneza, Mushonyi, Musasa, and Ruhango Sectors. This is our most important goal since these women have financial challenges considering their responsibility of child care with no contribution from their children’s fathers. Since 2019, in total two hundred eighteen ( 218) single mothers got support given by Berwa Kinunu, the majority of whom are teenagers who have completed more than six-months training in tailoring but out of two hundred-eighteen (218), one hundred seventy-one (171 ) were provided with a sewing machine each and with the support of the program they are currently earning a decent income since they are associated in a cooperative with different tailoring workshops in different small rural business centers across the four administrative sectors. Currently, forty-seven single teen mothers are acquiring the same skills in tailoring training offered by Berwa Kinunu and we still have many single teen mothers on the waiting list to help but again this issue is not the specialty or uniqueness of this community but the entire country is facing the same issue.

Meet our young mothers benefited from our services

“I am very much thankful to the Lord and to BERWA-Kinunu project in a special way because apart from the training I have received from Berwa-Kinunu project, I was blessed to meet up with other girls of...”

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“I got pregnant when I was 15 years old, and after 2 years of early illegal marriage, someone I called a husband to me has violated me hard which caused me to have physical disabilities for the rest of...”

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“I did not get a chance to finish school because my classmates had to always laugh at me because of my speech disorder and it was a shame on me so that makes me leave my school when I was in primary. A...”

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