RwandAir brings ‘Umuganda’ to Kampala

COMMUNITY SERVICE – BROUGHT TO KAMPALA BY RWANDAIR

(Posted 26th June 2016)

The Kampala suburb of Nakawa was the place where RwandAir, in conjunction with the Kampala Capital City Authority, launched their unique community service programme from back home, called ‘Umuganda‘.
In Rwanda, every last Saturday of the month, do all citizens participate for half a day to clean up neighbourhoods, create recreational parks and engage in other community based activities, normally led by the Head of State and his family President Paul Kagame.
This unique approach to have local communities and people take responsibility for their own neighbourhood has been a success story over the years and RwandAir in Uganda – Ms. Ada Magezi is the country manager based in the airline’s office at Rwenzori Court – has now taken the lead and brought the concept back to Uganda.
Soon after the liberation war and into the early 1990’s did Uganda too have such measures in place, where local RC’s, short for ‘Resistance Council‘ now called Local Council 1, engaged in similar measures before a liberalized economy and the loss of discipline across much of society saw the scheme falter and disappear.

(President Kagame doing his Umuganda duty alongside ordinary Rwandans and even foreign residents – picture courtesy of New Times)

RwandAir serves Ugandans under fifth freedom rights out of Entebbe with flights to Juba, double daily flights to Nairobi and several connections a day between Kigali and Entebbe with flights, depending on aircraft type uses, lasting between 35 and 45 minutes. From Kigali then does the airline connect passengers to 5 destinations in West Africa, two in Southern Africa, the rest of East Africa and Dubai. From September onwards will RwandAir then add intercontinental flights when the first of two Airbus A330 aircraft join the fleet.