Project Umubano Turns 5
Jono Broom 12.30am
Project Umubano has completed its fifth year.
Strongly championed by David Cameron whilst in opposition, it helped form part of the narrative of change, not only internally in the party but also with the world outside Conservative politics.
It is a remarkable project. Led by then Shadow International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell MP, it hit the ground running in 2007 with 43 volunteers heading to the Rwandan capital Kigali, forming partnerships with local organisations working in the education, health, community, legal and private enterprise sectors. It was as part of the Community project that I first got involved with Umubano in 2008.
By last summer, with Stephen Crabb MP now in charge, volunteer numbers in Rwanda had grown to nearly 100 and the scope of the project’s work had evolved to include dentists, a group of volunteers working with the support of the FA in London helping to improve access to and coaching standards of the ‘Beautiful Game’ and a similar group focusing on cricket. Yes, there is an increasingly vibrant cricket scene in Rwanda!
Less spoken about is its expansion in 2009 into Sierra Leone, driven by David Mundell MP. Since then David has been running a legal project which started in Freetown and which has now expanded to include helping to train paralegals in the provincial cities of Bo and Makeni. In 2010 a medical team was added and in 2011 a community team was established taking the number of volunteers in Sierra Leone to twenty-two.
My return to Project Umubano in 2011 was as part of the new community team partnering with London based charity Street Child of Sierra Leone (SCoSL) for the first time, working with SCoSL at their main project centre in Makeni about four hours’ drive north east of Freetown.
Their project, now in its fourth year, seeks not only permanently to stop the need for children to live on the streets but also to reintegrate them into the education system by providing a grant to cover their school fees for a year and, where possible and appropriate, re-uniting them with their families. The families in turn are given access the project’s micro finance grants and ongoing advice from SCoSL’s business team to build a more sustainable future for the whole family.
As part of the process of preparing the children for re-integration into school, SCoSL puts the children through an 8-week summer school. The twelve-strong Community Team found themselves very much in at the deep end, actually leading core curriculum lessons from Primary through to GCSE level and beyond.
We tested the waters for an expanded project next year by sending a small team to another SCoSL centre for the second half of the project. With SCoSL’s help, it was a great success and in 2012 we plan to operate in several SCoSL locations.
As powerful as I believe the work of Umubano is, and that of its sister Project Maja which I was part of in Srebrenica in northern Bosnia in 2009 and which this year headed out to Bangladesh, there are those who try to dismiss them as publicity stunt gesture politicking and others who wonder why the 120+ people involved this year didn’t volunteer for a UK based project. Both sentiments are wrong.
The volunteers that I’ve met are mostly involved at a local level in the Conservative party and on top of the time that they dedicate locally they then give up a significant amount of their vacation time to volunteer as part of a self-funded project where their knowledge and experience is used to great effect helping local people build, in some cases literally, their communities and their aspirations.
The project is also pointedly not used in a party political manner either on the ground or back home and neither should it be. All the volunteers are members of the Conservative party and as such share a common purpose, but Umubano also offers something that is perhaps surprisingly not easily accessible elsewhere: it offers individuals the opportunity to volunteer for just 2 weeks but to work on projects that genuinely do have a long term and lasting legacy. It has also not gone unnoticed by the Foreign Office, DfID and the British Council. In Rwanda they are particularly supportive, and in Sierra Leone increasingly so.
There are downsides too. Unsurprisingly the biggest challenges are logistical, however Umubano is not a tour organising company. I suspect too that the structure of Umubano may need to change: it is not a charity and as such if any third party funding were to support aspects of the project it would be subject to the rules surrounding Political Party Donations. If Umubano is to have maximum impact in the future I believe that this will need to change.
Of one thing I’m sure: Project Umubano should continue to be an important part of the broader Conservative Party social action family. I very much hope that it will.
Jono Broom is Project Coordinator for Project Umubano and this article first appeared in the Autumn edition of Reformer, the journal of the Tory Reform Group
