IT'S Wednesday night in Gikongoro and the bar at the Promotion Feminine is packed. Here in the highlands of southern Rwanda it is cold and there's a storm raging outside, but aid workers and missionary priests gather nonetheless for their weekly poker session.
An expatriate get together far from home maybe, but the Promotion is no colonial type golf and country club. The bar is filled with locals, on both sides of the counter.
Promotion is a women's co operative designed to keep what little money there is in Gikongoro in the local economy.
At lunchtime, it serves fish which were harvested in ponds up the road in Kavili. A group of 20 women run these two ponds, harvesting maybe 50 kg of perch twice a year. In the market in Gikongoro, a kilo of fish sells for about £1 the resulting profits are reinvested in the farm or distributed among the women for their own use.
The common link in all these projects is outside involvement. In a country as damaged as Rwanda - where 800,000 were murdered in the genocide and the cash economy is virtually non-existent outside the towns - the wherewithal to improve the lot of the rural peasant is limited.
Development projects such as those co ordinated by Trocaire in Gikongoro are crucial to the future of Rwanda. Now that peace, however uneasy, reigns, and most of the refugees have returned to the country, the hard task of rebuilding the rural infrastructure begins.
The genocide was completed in six bloody weeks in 1994, but the reconstruction of this society could take decades.
Whatever hope there is now for Rwanda may lie in applying the co operative and self help principles which were so successfully used to develop Irish agriculture. The positioning of women as the linchpin of rural redevelopment also parallels the Irish experience.
Trocaire's £1 million development programme in Gikongoro includes a number of schemes in which local farmers and women's groups are given low interest loans to buy new stock or open a business.
The schemes are integrated to maximise the benefit to the local authority. For example, the dressmaking co operative established with Trocaire's aid is currently making uniforms for pupils in the new primary school built by the agency nearby. The local carpentry workshop is making desks for a school built by the agency.
Another group has been given seeds, tools and technical help to plant new crops. These go to feed goats and chickens bought with a loan from the agency.
Things don't always work out smoothly and old rivalries die hard. The women's group in Kavili ("we don't want men because they only spend the money on beer") were lent money to buy a cow. There was discontent that the cow was leaving her manure in one woman's plot only, so the members decided to exchange the cow for 10 goats.
Another Irish agency, Refugee Trust, has targeted its self help scheme on some of the many child headed households, another tragic by product of the genocide. At Mugambazi, children as young as 12 have been in charge of their families since their parents were murdered.
Refugee Trust helps them repair or rebuild the family home. The oldest children look after their younger brothers and sisters, who are encouraged to attend school, and the agency pays their fees and buys uniforms.
It has also provided loans for a group of children to buy goats, which provide their families with milk, meat and a source of income.
With more than 200 women's groups now established throughout the country, there is some evidence that a network of self help initiatives may be emerging in Rwanda. The hope is that these small projects will eventually prove self sufficient, independent both of foreign aid and the stifling hand of local bureaucracy and government interference.
Now that the refugees have returned, Rwanda seems set to benefit from a greatly increased flow of aid. This was the situation until the genocide, when it was one of the most aided countries in the world - in the 1980s, foreign assistance accounted for more than 70 per cent of public investment.
Yet this high level of foreign involvement was accompanied by an almost complete blindness to the tensions and inequalities in the country. Donors were happy that the usual indices GNP, exports, energy production, etc - were rising, and ignored the underlying problems.
The lesson for those delivering aid today is clear. Ignore the social aspect of development - human rights, income inequality, justice - at your peril. Listen to the messages coming out of local communities. Act locally. Be prepared to stay in for the long haul.
Rwanda and the international community cannot afford to get it wrong a second time.
