Empower Refugee Youth Through Dance

On November 23rd, for the first time in nine months, MindLeaps Rwanda's Jim Bell Centre in Kigali welcomed students back for in-person activities including dance, academic tutoring sessions, IT classes, and meals. Dance classes resumed in smaller and socially distant formats. The children were thrilled to come back to the center for these activities and to reconnect in-person with their friends.

Also in November, formal schooling resumed in Rwanda. MindLeaps was sponsoring 172 students in Rwanda to attend school, when in March all the schools shutdown due to the pandemic. Of the several long-term effects on school-age children, reports have shown that as many as 24 million additional children will permanently drop out of school due to the break in education from COVID-19 (UNICEF, 2020), adding to the 258 million currently out of school. When schools reopened last month in Rwanda, MindLeaps students' back-to-school rate was 100%. All 172 of MindLeaps sponsored students resumed their studies at various primary and secondary schools.

MindLeaps Virtual Academy is continuing to teach our trainers and older students in seven different subject areas. The participants recently completed a course on Inclusion. The Inclusion curriculum covers multiple topics including Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, steps in building inclusive communities, and how the arts can help to practice inclusion. This in-depth training follows MindLeaps' launch of an adapted dance curriculum in the Rwanda refugee camps in 2019, further enabling MindLeaps dance trainers to teach children of different abilities in the classroom and dance studio.

In 2021, the fluctuation in COVID-19 cases may cause multiple changes in what activities are open or shutdown. Despite these changes and challenges, MindLeaps will use its Virtual Academy to reach youth in refugees camps and in extreme poverty, furthering its mission of providing educational paths to the world’s most vulnerable children.