The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) is finally taking place in Kigali. To Rwanda’s hospitality industry, it is a big deal because business will be booming. More than 100 hotels have flung their doors wide open, ready to receive the expected 5,000 delegates. To the Government of Rwanda, CHOGM is a big deal because it will showcase Rwanda’s ability to effectively host the world. To the Heads of State who will be striding the event’s red carpet, CHOGM is a big deal because it will give them an opportunity to fraternize, network and make major decisions that touch on the event’s theme, “Delivering a Common Future: Connecting, Innovating, Transforming”. What about the ordinary Rwandans, East Africans and citizens of the 54 Commonwealth Member States? To what extent is this year’s CHOGM a big deal for them? How will the shop owner in Remera, one of Kigali’s suburbs, or the smallholder farmer in Ngoma, Eastern Rwanda, benefit from CHOGM? In the same vein, how will CHOGM benefit students in Kenya’s University of Nairobi or the Matoke vendors at Kampala’s Owino Market? Such ordinary people are often so far removed from major conferences that many don’t even know of the conferences. In order to answer this critical question about CHOGM’s benefit to ordinary people, let me press the rewind button and take you back to sixteen years ago. In November 2006, I participated in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) twelfth Conference of Parties (COP 12) in Nairobi, Kenya. I was at the time working with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). I was also one of the founders of the Africa Youth Initiative on Climate Change (AYICC), which we officially launched during a side event of this UN Conference. I suspect that just like me, most of the thousands of delegates who come to this COP 12 cannot remember the Conference’s resolutions. But I can definitely remember how we mobilized fellow youth from dozens of countries to take full advantage of the event to launch an African youth initiative that is still standing strong today. The lesson learned back then was that the onus is often on the ‘ordinary’ people to leverage such big events to advance their noble agendas. Thankfully, CHOGM has inbuilt platforms for facilitating citizen participation. The Commonwealth People’s Forum (CPF) will bring together civil society representatives from the Commonwealth countries. Through the Forum, they will deliberate at length on the event’s title, ‘Delivering a Common Future: Our health, Our planet, Our future.” This will give them a chance to address common citizen challenges and propose unique solutions. Just as important, their mere presence at the event will grant them priceless networking opportunities. The Commonwealth Women’s Forum and the Commonwealth youth Forum are also official CHOGM events. They will present youth and women invaluable networking opportunities. In order to rope in participation of thousands of youth who will not be physically present in the events, Over the Phone Simultaneous Interpretation and Remote Simultaneous Interpretation of proceedings into Kinyarwanda, Swahili and other Commonwealth Countries African languages can be of great help! As Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.” I am sure leading Language Service Providers such as Languages Africa Rwanda, www.languagesafrica.com, can take up this challenge and work hand in hand with the CHOGM Secretariat to make this happen at a moment’s notice! However, the Heads of State must also live up to CHOGM’s theme and innovate new ways of ensuring CHOGM’s relevance in this third decade of the 21st century. They can do this by looking at the example of Rwanda, the host country. Despite being one of Africa’s smallest countries; despite the immense odds stacked against it after the genocide against the Tutsis, Rwanda has emerged as a development pacesetter in Africa. This has been achieved partly through a laser focus on action, not just empty talk. This action-oriented approach is exactly what CHOGM needs. It must ensure actionable steps on a key issue like trade. CHOGM Member States should engage in more robust trade with each other. In particular, the 19 African Members of CHOGM should be able to export much more to the UK and other Wealthier members of CHOGM. If this happens, ordinary Africans will begin to feel CHOGM’s concrete benefits. David Bwakali is Creative and Strategic Director at Languages Africa Rwanda. He is also the Founder and Captain of the Africa Creative Action, an organization that employs the full range of creativity in realizing sustainability.
