Background:

During the Rwandan genocide in 1994, an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 Rwandans were killed during the 100-day period from April 7 to mid-July. After the genocide, the pace of arrests overwhelmed the physical capacity of the Rwandan prison system. The country’s 19 prisons, designed to hold 18,000 inmates, were holding 100,000 people by 1998.

Since 2010, the TFT Foundation has sponsored multiple trauma relief missions to Rwanda, during which a community-led TFT deployment model was refined and proven extraordinarily effective. In 2016, the foundation-sponsored Izere Center had the opportunity to provide a TFT pilot training to Rwanda Correctional Service (RCS) staff, and the training’s extraordinary success led to an invitation from the RCS Commissioner General to train the remainder of the RCS staff throughout the country’s prisons.

Progress:

We are very pleased to share that project execution is off to a good start. The first training was delivered in fall 2016, and a second one was delivered in March 2017. The RCS project teams operate in close collaboration with the RCS existing medical and psychological service providers. Psychologists, psychiatric nurses, and social workers are also trained and incorporated in permanent teams at the respective prisons where appropriate and possible. With adequate funding, the TFT Foundation will be able to supplement the local team’s progress monitoring efforts with independent reviews of the ongoing work. Discussions are ongoing with researchers involved in the previous TFT Foundation missions and research in Rwanda to fulfill that opportunity.