Nathalie Gahunga

Rwanda (Regional Expert: Great Lakes)

Africa’s Great Lakes region—which includes Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Rwanda—is afflicted by multidimensional conflicts within and across national borders. Nathalie Gahunga is one of five 2003-2004 fellows at the Boston Consortium for Gender, Peace, Security, and Human Rights, which pools the resources of five leading academic centers and programs in Boston. Ms. Gahunga is currently drafting a study on gender and peace building in the Great Lakes region. Encouraging a regional approach to peace building, she focuses on problems common to women across the area and suggests that links among them could foster a solution. As a program officer at the Canadian Centre for International Studies and Cooperation (CECI), she planned joint peace-building projects with regional organizations. While with CECI, she was also a founding facilitator of Concertation des Collectifs d’Associations oeuvrant pour la Promotion de la Femme de la Sous-Region des Grands Lacs (COCAFEM/GL), a network that uses connections among women’s organizations in Burundi, Rwanda, and the North and South Kivu regions of the DRC to promote peace. Ms. Gahunga is a founding member of the regional network Initiative de Genève pour la Paix dans la Région des Grands Lacs. Following the 1994 genocide, she wrote grant proposals for funds and materials for the Associazone Solidarieta’e Sviluppo (Association for Solidarity and Development) to build new homes for the many widows. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Ms. Gahunga’s peace-building activities include:

• authoring a position paper with COCAFEM’s regional vision for International Women’s Day 2003—“Perspective régionale des Femmes de la Sous-Région des Grands Lacs”;
• chronicling the impact of conflict on women in the Great Lakes region in “La Paix au Féminin,” for the Canadian non-governmental organization Carrefour Tiers Monde;
• participating in conferences and training courses on conflict management, mediation, advocacy, development, microcredit and capacity-building programs, economic negotiations, and the “Do No Harm” approach to aid work; and
• acting as a steering committee member for the American Embassy program “Women as Partners for Peace,” which took place in 2000.

return to top