WITH CIYOTA, ALUMNI RETURN TO GIVE BACK TO ITS SUCCESS
By: The Partnership, Psipse
Tags: Heroes, Life Skills, Sdgs, Refugees, Education

Nziyonvira Ntakamaze, executive director of COBURWAS International Youth Organization to Transform Africa (CIYOTA). Ntakamze grew up in the same refugee camp that he returned to work in.

One of the biggest success stories coming out of COBURWAS International Youth Organization to Transform Africa (CIYOTA) is in the form of the organization’s own executive director, Nziyonvira Ntakamaze, who is also a graduate of the program.

Ntakamaze and his family escaped from the North Kivu region of the Democratic of Congo in December 1998 when he was just nine-years-old. And he vividly remembers arriving in the area that later turned into Kyangwali Refugee Settlement in Western Uganda.

“We were living in the bush with monkeys and baboons,” he said.” We had no protection. I remember there were many mosquitos and lots of people died from many diseases. It was very hard”.

Today, Kyangwali, located in Hoima district, now houses up to 90,000 people, 80 percent of whom are Congolese.

For nine-year-old Ntakamaze, he thought his time in Uganda would be brief. But soon this strange land became home.

“When I looked at the bush around us, it was hard to imagine being here forever,” he said “I always thought that each year we would go back. But as time moved on, we saw we wouldn’t go back.”

Luckily, he was always a good student and excelled at a primary school in the settlement. For secondary school, he won a United Nations scholarship, and later an EDUCATE! scholarship to attend a school 50 miles outside the camp.

While there, he met the CIYOTA founders in 2005 and they bonded over finding solutions to refugee problems. Why are people not going to school? What are the other challenges in the refugee settlement? How can we be part of the solution?

Years later, he became one of the few from the camp to go to university. He started his coursework in veterinary science at Makerere University before a Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program scholarship sent him to the University of Rochester in the U.S. to study mechanical engineering in 2013.

The cold Rochester winters were a shock, but Ntakamaze was further taken aback at how unprepared he was for the education system. He recalls a time when a professor assigned homework from the Blackboard Learning, a Web-based virtual learning environment that is common in education systems in the U.S.

But Ntakamaze did not know the program as he had never owned a computer. “So I missed the assignment,” he laughed as he remembered that time.

Despite the difficulties, he was still involved in CIYOTA even from afar. He would skype into the online meetings and even help with fundraising from America.

He later graduated with his mechanical engineering degree and moving to Tennessee to work in manufacturing. His family, by then, had also been resettled in Tennessee as refugees.

“I was making decent money, and my family was comfortable, but I could not stop thinking of Kyangwali,” he said.

“I knew in the refugee resettlement, there were so many students who did not have the chance that I had to get a scholarship to go to school. I knew I needed to come back and give back. “

“I may not be able to help thousands of people. But if we have we maybe help 500 this year, those 500 are going to help others. So in the long run, we will have a bigger impact.”

In 2018, he returned to take on the executive director role of the organization.

But his story is not unique within the CIYOTA ecosystem. There are other administrators within the program who were also CIYOTA graduates that returned to work in the organization as it has grown. Favourite Regina, a Congolese refugee, also earned a Mastercard Foundation scholarship to attend the United States International University Kenya. She now leads community building at CIYOTA. All this is possible through the Come Back and Give Back program, which gives alumni a chance to get involved.

“This organization has been led by students right from the beginning, so this is why this happens,” Ntakamaze said, referencing CIYOTA’s own founders, Benson Wereje, Bahati Kanyamanza, and Daniel Muhwezi, who came from the camp. “Even if we can wait for other people to come and help us, we also have a bigger responsibility or a role to play in creating our own solutions.”

Since Ntakamaze’s return for his new role, CIYOTA has won the prestigious Ockenden International Prize, which rewards successful on-the-ground projects for refugees and displaced people around the world, boosting the organization to do other great things. The win couldn’t have arrived at a better time as a new influx of Congolese refugees started coming to Kyangwali starting in December 2018.

As he drives through Kywangali, Ntakamaze passed by the first house his family ever built in the settlement. It is a tiny brick bungalow with a tin roof.

“It has been 21 years and my family has come far,” he said. “But in many ways, Kyangwali is still my home.”