Clifford Chance

As Rwanda marked 30 years since the genocide on 7 April 2024, one aim of our Cornerstone initiative – leave a legacy – is being realised by a project providing psychological and employability support to survivors and their children.

For four years, we have been working with Survivors Fund (SURF), an NGO, to offer mental health services to survivors of the genocide alongside assistance to survivors and their children to help them into employment.

We have provided grant-funding to enable SURF to scale the phone-based and peer counselling support that they provide to survivors and their families suffering mental health issues, including the children of survivors who were born as a result of rape during the genocide. This support is particularly important during the anniversary of the atrocity, when many experience acute trauma.

During the year ended 30 April 2024, the four national toll-free helplines that we are supporting have answered more than 11,000 calls from nearly 6,000 survivors, while the 384 peer support counsellors trained by the programme have made over 14,000 callouts to service users. The results show a 100% caller satisfaction rate and a 98% effectiveness score. This scaling has been possible in part due to the extensive social media and radio promotion of the service that our grant was able to fund.

SURF has also trained nearly 200 community health officers who have helped almost 1,500 Community Health Workers to refer and treat survivors better. The Rwandan government has this year ended the provision of specialised legacy mental health support to survivors. The key achievement of our partnership has been in strengthening SURF's capacity to support survivors as they transition to accessing services from the country's mainstream mental health services for the first time.

Alongside this, SURF’s Youth Economic Empowerment Project continues to deliver entrepreneurship, work readiness and vocational training and business loans to survivors, strengthening their ability to support themselves and their families for years to come.

To date, the project has provided loans to 290 survivor-owned businesses (with a 95% repayment rate), secured internships for 214 survivors, delivered 155 vocational training courses and contributed to the establishment of 921 survivor-owned businesses.