Omar Valdimarsson in Bujumbura, Burundi
“People no longer ask what the Burundi Red Cross does, they know it. They can see it in their communities.”
Balthazar Bacinoni, the branch coordinator for the Burundi Red Cross, is visibly proud of the progress his society has made in the last couple of years. The society that was sometimes seen as East Africa’s ‘problem child’ and was in long-standing discussions with both the International Federation and the ICRC over integrity issues (including not holding a general assembly for nearly three decades) is undergoing a remarkable transformation.
Headquarters staff has been cut from nearly 60 to eleven, all but two of provincial branches have held elections, governance members and volunteers are undergoing basic training, there is a strategic plan in place, the statutes have been revised and there is clear separation between governance and management. Relations with the new government of the country have gotten off on a mutually respectable footing. But most importantly, says Balthazar Bancinoni, “the society is now owned by the volunteers and the elected branch committees.”
So, what happened? What caused this transformation and the new spirit that is found in the tormented country’s National Society?
Well, partly it’s the peace agreement and Burundi’s possibility to look to the future for the first time in nearly a decade and a half – but most people seem to agree that it’s mostly thanks to Anselme Katiyunguruza, the society’s new secretary-general, and his hand-picked staff.
When he took over the helm two years ago – and had only one staff - Balthazar Bacinoni - there was no functioning national board, no structures, no active branches. The country was in ruins after a long-running civil war – only the latest in a series of violent conflicts in the tiny country since independence in the mid 1960s. Both the International Federation and the ICRC had had a long-standing presence in the country and devoted much time, funds and energy into revitalizing the society and its branches. After the Federation left in the late 1990s, the branches went back into hibernation and the ICRC worked independently in fulfilling its mandate.
Anselme was not new to the Burundi Red Cross. As a younger man he had worked as a voluntary communications officer for ten years while working as a journalist and communications officer for the state radio, UNICEF and the president’s office, as well as teaching journalism at Bujumbura University. “It never entered my mind that I would one day be working here full time,” he says.
With a National Society that was more an idea than reality, there was a lot of work to be done. After being given a guarantee by Burundi RC’s long-serving president, Dr. François Xavier Buyoya, that he would be allowed to have a free rein in making management decisions, Anselme set about organizing regional meetings with four provincial branches. “We sat down and thought about what the future of the Red Cross in Burundi should and could look like,” he says. “Quite a number of people showed up and I asked them: Well, do you want to be members of the Red Cross? Fortunately, many said yes.”
The new leadership of the society encouraged the newly elected boards to register members, organize assemblies in the communes and come up with 3-year work plans. Provincial assemblies followed with a 2-year work plan.
When this was in place the International Federation helped organize a General Assembly in Bujumbura in May 2005 – by then all but one of the provincial branches had held elections; the single remaining branch did so before the end of 2005. The General Assembly elected a new national board and formulated a Plan of Action for the next four years. An extra-ordinary assembly in February this year adopted new statutes. In cooperation with the Federation, the ICRC and the Spanish Red Cross new staff were recruited – for communications, health, finance and logistics, eleven in all.
Anselme was very clear on what sort of people he wanted: they all had to come from the volunteer corps.
“People who have been volunteers know what the Red Cross is about, they understand the needs of the communities and they are not here because this is a job, but because they want to belong to the Red Cross,” he says. “In the past, even if we had a large number of staff, we didn’t really have a vision of the future so we were more or less working in a vacuum. And, it should also be said, not everyone on the staff had the actual capacity to do what was needed.”
Anselme took his newly formulated vision into a partnership meeting in Nairobi and presented it to the participants during a half-day session on Burundi. “They liked what they heard and now we are in discussions with a few PNSs about partnerships in various areas,” he says.
A year after the first General Assembly in decades, the Burundi Red Cross now has some 40,000 volunteers in all provinces across the country. They’re being given basic training and are eager to work – but with so few resources and so many needs, it is hard going. All elected governance committee members, provincial and communal, have undergone general training on the Movement.
“Our challenge is to create permanent structures at the branch level but having only volunteers and no staff this is proving to be difficult,” Anselme says. “I want us to have a limited number of staff in the headquarters but more in the countryside – that’s where the work is done. We have appointed disaster management coordinators in all branches, a focal point for volunteering and a communications officer. What we really need, and are hoping to be able to set up in the near future, is a VHF radio network covering all the country. The telephone system is weak and not everyone can afford to have a mobile phone.”
Two recent events signal the growing recognition of Burundi Red Cross by the government and the humanitarian community in Burundi: the society is now likely to be given responsibility for food distribution in the five provinces most affected by food insecurity and returning refugees – and during an inter-agency disaster management meeting at the end of May there was general consensus that the society should be a key actor in the proposed national disaster management committee.
Anselme Katiyunguruza is optimistic that the peace will now hold in Burundi and that the ethnic clashes are a thing of the past. “I think we all realize that there is no need to continue fighting,” he says. “People are tired of war.”