Under Rwandan laws, a person exits their youthful years the moment they hit 30 years of age. This means they are considered complete adults who cannot benefit from different interventions that target the youth, including representation in various state organs.
Rwanda will this new year turn 30 years of age. 30 years since the country rose from the rubble of the Genocide against the Tutsi. It means that a child who was born in 1994 will turn 30 this year and will exit the youth bracket.
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Reflecting on Rwanda's journey for the last 30 years, there have been a lot of milestones where the country emerged from the hopeless state it was in when the Genocide was put to an end, to the respected nation-state that it is today, not just in the region but also across Africa and beyond.
Over the past three decades, the people of Rwanda have not only been given a new lease of life, they have been given enough reason to hope for a prosperous future for our country.
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In the aftermath of the genocide, the country had many problems. Over a million people had been killed; hundreds of thousands wounded either physically or psychologically, tens of thousands of orphaned children without a place to call home and an empty government coffers to mention a few.
Problems did not stop there; millions of Rwandans had returned home majority of them having been born in exile and putting all these people together to get the country moving was quite an uphill task.
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All in all, we soldiered on, thanks for the resilience of the people but above all, a determined leadership that was able to show direction.
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With most of these challenges now behind us, the task at hand is for us to move ahead and build a country that we all aspire to bequeath to our next generation. It is an easy one when compared to the challenges faced 30 years ago.
This will however require determination from all of us, because the direction for the journey ahead is already charted for us through well-elaborated development blueprints like the National Strategy for Transformation (NST1 and 2) for the short and medium term, and Vision 2050 for the long term.
The work is cut out for each one of us to build a country we all aspire to have in the next 20 years.
Happy New Year.
