Fatuma Ndangiza

Fatuma Ndangiza (born 1968) is a women's rights advocate, policy expert, and politician.

As of January 2024, she is serving her second term as a Rwandan member of the East African Legislative Assembly.

Born and raised in a refugee camp in Uganda, she returned to Rwanda during the civil war.

Initially she settled in Byumba and led the SOS Ramira initiative to assist women and children in acquiring basic supplies and treatment to meet their needs.

When the Rwandan Patriotic Front took control of Kigali, she moved to the capital and began working in the Ministry for Women and Family Promotion to provide support and relief to survivors and victims of the Rwandan genocide.

She helped to create the National Women's Council and its regional and local frameworks to empower women to help them achieve political and economic parity through legal change and advocacy.

Fatuma Ndangiza Nyirakobwa was born in 1968, in a refugee camp in Uganda.

Her family was Muslim, and she grew up in Uganda.

Many Rwandan Tutsis raised in refugee camps in Uganda wanted to move to Rwanda, but President Juvénal Habyarimana (term 1973–1994) prevented their return.

In 1986, some of the refugees formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and began demanding the right to resettle in Rwanda.

They formed a militia and in October 1990, began marching towards Kigali, beginning the Rwandan Civil War.

By the end of the year, most of the territory around Byumba was controlled by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which had become the centre for refuge efforts as people were brought there from other parts of the country for medical treatment.

Ndangiza joined the relief teams organised in Uganda and followed the troops to Byumba.

In Byumba, Ndangiza started a programme called SOS Ramira (from kuramira, meaning to save).

She worked with other women to help returnees, survivors, orphans and other displaced children to find clothes, basic medicines, food, and other essentials.

When the government began setting up social agencies they turned their attention to teaching people skills such as carpentry, farming, and sewing, so that they could earn an income.

When the Rwandan Patriotic Front took control of Kigali, Ndangiza made her way to the capital city.

She worked with Aloisea Inyumba, the Minister for Women and Family Promotion, on issues that women were facing as a result of the war.

There was no existing structure for the Ministry, which had previously served as a propaganda mechanism for the war.

Those who had to rebuild it from the ground up, were unpaid for the first year, while trying to provide urgently needed support and relief to survivors and victims of the Rwandan genocide.

As had been the case in Byumba, initially the needs were for clothing, medical supplies, and basic necessities.

This soon shifted to helping and training women to find employment.

In 1995, Ndangiza served as the coordinator between the Ministry for Women and Family Promotion and UNICEF.

Ndangiza became chair of a task force to create a National Women's Council, with the goal of uniting women and helping them move past their differences and work together on development and empowerment.

Their strategic planning sessions discussed how to increase women's participation in decision making and economic initiatives, while cultivating allies in the transitional legislature.

The structure decided upon was a national council acting as an umbrella network for provincial, district, sectional, and local councils through which their concerns and needs could be filtered.

The goal was to organise and prepare women throughout the country to become advocates for themselves, so that they would be ready to press for their rights when the first post-genocide elections occurred.

The first elections to the councils were held locally in 1996.

One of the women's first tasks was to review existing legislation which disadvantaged women and discriminated against them.

Calling together legal analysts and gender experts, the councils made proposals to change laws such as those preventing women from inheriting property.

She worked with the women's ministry until 2002.

Ndangiza led the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission from 2002 to 2009.

The goals of the commission were to analyse systems that had created divisions in the past, to confront systemic issues and to create state reforms for reshaping Rwanda's socio-political identity while protecting the human rights of all citizens.

She served as Rwandan ambassador to Tanzania from 2009 and was simultaneously appointed as the first Rwandan ambassador to the Seychelles in 2010.

Between 2012 and 2017, Ndangiza was the Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the Rwanda Governance Board.

In 2012, she was appointed by chairman Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to serve on the African Peer Review Forum's Panel of Eminent Persons, which she chaired for a two-year term from 2014 to 2016.

Both the Rwanda Governance Board and Panel of Eminent Persons are policy review mechanisms to ensure that development is sustainable and falls within a human rights framework.

Ndangiza was elected as one of Rwanda's nine members of the East African Legislative Assembly, the regional legislative body, in 2017.

She was elected to a second term in 2022.

Her goals during her tenure were to integrate the policies and procedures of the independent nation members in order to facilitate consistency and coordination across the region.