Duhamic-Adri, Association for Integrated rural development, was founded in 1979 with as mission to support rural community initiatives of self-development. Duhamic-Adri works particularly on conciousness raising among peasants around the mechanics of neglect and at offering services such as projects analysis, help in negotiations, training, support options...

The objectives are several :

• Fight against the neglect of the rural community
• Stimulate construction and merging of peasants groups and associations
• Reinforce collective actions among peasant associations by starting up or motivating the launch of independent organisational structures such as inter-grouping.
• Support of rural community initiatives in different development activities (agricultural production, processing and commercialisation, reforestation, craftsmanship, etc.)

Since 1978, Frères des Hommes has assisted in a program developping high quality woodworking in Northern, Central and Southern rural communities, in order to create jobs in rural areas where arable land is scarce and to market first local production rather than imports.

Very quickly notable results were seen. For example, several workshops were created to produce woodworking tools with market value. The high level of skill among the workers enabled them to also realize complex furniture. Added to basic carpentry training, courses on microcredit options, management, access to wood supply, marketing were offered to complete the needs of the benficiaries and users of the project.

At the beginning of the 1990s Frères des Hommes progressively withdraws from direct implication in this program and calls on DUHAMIC-ADRI, their partner who will take over their association with this project. And then, in 1994, a tragic era began for Rwanda with the genocide of nearly 1 million Tutsi and Hutu laypeople. After a long and fragile phase, our program was rebooted and in August 2008 a new 3-year project was launched.

Rwanda - Developing artisan woodwork to restore life to the countryside