This study related to the “Assessment of Consumer Protection in Rwandan Insurance Sector” has been motivated by many complaints we receive and hear from various customers in connection with their request for indemnification, particularly from private insurance companies. Indeed, different customers raise their complaints stating especially that they are not satisfied with the compensation amount, the long time or period taken by insurers for the indemnification, and unbalanced or unsatisfactory contracts they conclude. With regard to above complaints, we have undertaken the initiative to carry out this study with the purpose of evaluation or assessment of consumer protection in insurance sector. Therefore, after the identification of the existing Rwandan legal and institutional frameworks related to consumer protection, we made an assessment by comparison with international standards or benchmarks. The referred standards or benchmarks were those established by the World Bank given the responsibility of the latter in the guidance or management of financial institutions. Given the fact that the protection of consumers requires the existing of efficient and effective legal and institutional frameworks, our assessment focused on the two (2) respective aspects. Concerning the assessment of the legal framework, we have found out that, on the one hand, the Rwandan legislation in place comprises interesting consumer protecting provisions. On the other hand however, we pointed out that the existing Rwandan legal and regulatory framework has important gaps to be made up. Consequently, the related recommendation has been to fill the various gaps identified in the existing legal and regulatory framework. About the assessment of the current Rwandan institutional framework, we noticed that Rwanda has important and various institutions in charge notably of consumer protection. However, it has been underlined that the roles of some of them are overlapping, while other institutions are inactive. For this reason, it has been recommended to clearly specify respective missions of different involved institutions, to sensitize consumer associations for playing their responsibilities, and to speed up the enactment of the law governing the forthcoming Competition and Consumer Protection Regulatory Body.

In all communities, conflicts are natural and inevitable; they are inherent to human being interactions. Family based land conflicts are among the most conflicts that result from the use of the scarce resource land. Rwanda is not an exception to these conflicts. Family based land conflicts are exacerbated by the problem of population growth especially the sub-division of land for inheritances purposes. This makes family members quarrel in order to have a big part of land and their socio-economic development is undermined. A study was conducted in Karongi District especially in Gishyita and Mubuga sectors in order to analyze the impact family based land conflicts may have on socio-economic development of family members. The results of the study have revealed that the key salient family based land conflicts are those between parents and their children, between brothers and sisters, between husbands and wives as well as those between orphans and their relatives. Furthermore, the results revealed that the main causes of such conflicts are poverty, land scarcity, polygamy, ignorance of the law related to inheritance and succession, inheritance as well as the desire to satisfy selfish interest. The results have proven that family based land conflicts have a negative impact on socio-economic development of family members. For the impact on economic development, such conflicts reduce family income, agricultural productivity as well as agricultural employment. As regard to the impact on social development, family based land conflicts restrain the capacity of family members to access health care, shelter and education. In addition to that, family based land conflicts lead very often to violence. Some cases of parricide, fratricide and infanticide have observed in Mubuga and Gishyita sectors. For that reason, some recommendations have been formulated in order to solve family based land conflicts in a peaceful way.

The research on “A four language glossary of hospital basic terms: English-French-Swahili-Kinyarwanda”was aimed at compiling a glossary of terms used to refer to departments or services, health professionals and tools existing at hospital. Field tours, interviews, questionnaires and documentation are the research methods that I used to collect the 276 terms that made up the corpus of the study. The main objective was to seek for their equivalents in English, French, Swahili and Kinyarwanda in order to allow efficient medical communication in the Great Lakes region and all over the world as the languages implied are worldwide. Furthermore, this glossary will be useful to various people including patients, health professionals and owners of health care providing institutions. It will be beneficial to translators or interpreters. They will use it as a reference in their carreer once they are engaged in mediating the patient and the health care provider.