The story of Aline Uwimbabazi

Within Make Way, we create safe spaces. These are physical spaces where youth with compounded vulnerabilities meet, share their lived experiences, and get knowledge on topics around their sexual reproductive health and rights. The purpose of these spaces is to create a space where young people can connect and freely express their challenges on SRHR to their peers. Through safe spaces facilitators, identified challenges can be solved and difficult ones will be referred to duty bearers.

Uwimbabazi Aline is a 16-year-old girl who passionately attended safe spaces since October 2022, these spaces are extremely helpful for her, as she can finally mingle with other youth discussing their health issues. She and her mother live together in extreme poverty. Her mother has a disability as well and is uneducated. Aline has a physical disability and can’t stand on her feet; therefore, she used her hands as feet. This made that she had to stop going to school since the pandemic in 2020, as the shame of her way of walking got intense and took a great toll on her self-esteem and mental health.

Learn Work Develop, a Make Way collaborating partner in Rwanda, took care of this case by linking it to another one of their programs “Bikes not Bombs” and lobbied to have a wheelchair among the bikes that this program was going to support. This was successful and a wheel chair was granted to Aline.  As of now, Aline returned to school and said that she can’t wait to go to the youth corner at their Health center to get SRHR services that she heard fellow youth talking about in safe spaces. Her case has also been linked to duty bearer in the sector: an executive secretary, who pledged to invest more in issues of youth with compounded vulnerabilities. As the most intersection to this is poverty she spoke on exploring how these youths could be assisted as part of the socio-protection mechanism.

Aline and Make Way team with her newly acquired wheel chair: