AN EMPOWERING WOMEN'S CENTER IN RWANDA
Architectural designer Sharon Davis helps to create a forward-thinking educational and community center in Kayonza to train and educate local women through farming
When New York City architectural designer Sharon Davis first visited Kayonza, a village in eastern Rwanda, in 2009, she witnessed up close the economic hardship and lack of basic necessities in this region that has seen more than its share of conflict. “We came upon children and women lugging jugs of water from a dirty stream that looked like mud,” she recalls. “That was their drinking water.” There were no treatment facilities for water or for waste, and little firewood for cooking.
Commissioned by the Washington, D.C., nonprofit Women for Women International, Davis crafted a plan for an educational and community center in Kayonza to help female survivors of war start businesses to support themselves and their families. The focus is on training residents to transition from subsistence farming to larger‐scale entrepreneurial farming.
Photo: Tyler Survant
After four years of planning and construction, the Women’s Opportunity Center opened this summer on a five-acre campus and features a series of rounded brick-walled buildings topped by steel water-catchment roofs. The center, which Davis designed pro bono, is intended as a model of small-scale sustainable architecture. The 450,000 bricks used to create the structures were handmade by local women from clay dug up on the site. (In that project, Davis helped them devise a better brick, and the workers gained another income-generating skill.) Rainwater collected by the leaf-shaped roofs is purified by solar-powered sand- and UV-filtration systems and stored for drinking and cooking. As Davis notes, “How can you run a business if you’re spending four hours a day getting water?” Composting toilets, meanwhile, provide fertilizer for fields. And in addition to classrooms and offices, the center has a working farm for hands-on training, storage for communal tools and processing equipment, and a marketplace where the women can sell their produce.
Photo: Elizabeth Felicella
“It’s design meeting development,” says Afshan Khan, president of Women for Women International. “The center allows the women of Kayonza to become producers, owners, job creators, and leaders in their community. It’s amazing to see their resilience and progress.”
For her part, Davis is eager to do more. “I ended up helping to found a nonprofit called Big Future Group,” she says. “We’re looking for other projects like this around the world.”sharondavisdesign.com and womenforwomen.org
