-The Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion today organized the National Gender and Family Cluster (NGFC) Steering Committee Meeting held in Kigali. The meeting brought together different actors from Gender and Family sector to discuss ways of strengthening coordination to support MIGEPROF and other National Gender Machinery institutions to promote gender equality, family promotion, and child rights protection, as well as to utilize partners' efforts to improve interventions, synergize and avoid duplication.

In her opening remarks, Minister of Gender and Family Promotion Ambassador Soline Nyirahabimana reiterated that around the world and even in Rwanda Gender Based Violence (GBV) is increasingly being recognized as one of the hindrances of economic growth adding that other issues like malnutrition, stunting, school drop-outs, teenage pregnancies, divorce among others discourage the economic development in the long-run.

To address these issues, the Minister echoed: 'I call upon everyone present here, Government Institutions, Development partners, Private Sector, the Civil Society Organizations, International and National NGOs, Faith Based Organizations, Academia and Media, to join us in creating sustainable mechanisms of planning together, delivering as one and avoiding any overlaps in all our interventions while dealing with these pertinent challenges that I mentioned'.

Ambassador Nyirahabimana accentuated that strengthening the coordination mechanisms will result in building prosperous and stable families that are the foundation in building the Rwanda we want.

During the meeting, participants agreed on coordination mechanisms from national level up to the village level. At the national level, MIGEPROF chairs the NGFC steering committee with the main tasks of overseeing the strategic direction for the NGFC; approve the strategic and action plans, ensuring that all member institutions work together towards common objectives of the cluster while at grassroots level, Family council, Isibo, Parents’ evening Forum, Friends of Family (IZU) also work together in mapping partners at decentralized level; elaborating and implement together a  single annual action plan and consolidate and produce a quarterly reports.

Participants were also presented some of the upcoming events that will be focused on during the next Fiscal Year, including: The Study on GBV root causes and IOSC service delivery which is being conducted by MIGEPROF; review of the National Gender Equality policy and National Family Promotion policy that will kick off in January 2019; the CSW 63, Beijing +25, preparation and celebration of the International Women’s Day on 8th March 2019.

The National Gender and Family Cluster (NGFC) was revived and officially instituted on 29th March, 2018 with the aim of strengthening the coordination and support MIGEPROF & other National Gender Machinery institutions together with relevant partners to jointly plan, implement and report together.

It brings together different actors from gender and family promotion areas both public institutions, development partners, NGOs, civil Society, Faith Based Organizations and the private sector.