After five years, the Carleton-Rwanda initiative has been suspended due to insufficient funds.
Allan Thompson, the founder of the initiative, declared the program’s suspension Sept. 1.
Thompson said he founded the initiative in 2006 in response to what he witnessed as a journalist working in Rwanda in 1996-1998, just after the 1994 genocide.
“I was taken [aback] by Rwanda and how journalists there had failed miserably (to cover the genocide),” Thompson said.
He said he also noticed how there weren’t many veteran journalists available to teach at the National University of Rwanda (NUR), which had a journalism program.
Thompson said he created the initiative to recruit veteran journalists to teach journalism at the NUR. He also created an internship program to expose young Canadian journalists, including those from Carleton, to Rwanda.
Carleton journalism professor Jeff Sallot is one of the journalists who traveled to Rwanda and taught adult night school as well as undergraduate students at the university.
He said he is very proud of what his students in Rwanda have accomplished.
“We have scores of Rwandan journalists who have benefited from our training,” Sallot said. “It is sad that we have to fold in our tent because of money.”
Thompson admits that funding for the initiative has always been an issue as there was never a long-term funding plan.
The project was originally funded by the Canadian government and private donors, Thompson said.
More recently, it has been primarily funded in partnership with a Washington based organization called IREX, which secures its funding from the United States Agency for International Development.
That agreement ended May 15, and since then, Thompson said he has been financing the Rwanda Initiative’s operations through funds that had been earned by The Centre for Media and Transitional Societies. That money has now been exhausted as well, Thompson said.
Thompson also said the longstanding arrangement with the NUR to pay rent for their project house in Kigali has also fallen through, forcing them to vacate the house by the end of August and let staff members go.
Even though the funding for sending veteran journalists and teachers to Rwanda has dwindled, Thompson said it’s important for students to know that the suspension of the initiative doesn’t mean the end of the internship program.
There will still be interns sent to many African countries including Rwanda, just on a much smaller scale.
This is good news for those who’d like to follow in the footsteps of Margaret Cappa, a Carleton journalism alumnus who traveled to Rwanda as in intern during the summer of 2010.
“It was a unique experience just because we were there for the presidential elections,” Cappa said. “However, everyone will have their own special experience.”
Cappa said she is amazed at the entire effect the Rwanda Initiative has had on journalism in Rwanda.
“It saddens me that partnerships have to be put on hold.
However, you can find some solace in the fact that the Rwanda Initiative has done so much over the past five years. People [who] they taught are now teaching,” Cappa said.
“The service to humankind is admirable, not only for journalism but for humanity.”
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