https://dr.ur.ac.rw/handle/123456789/23 Research works students of the College of Arts and Social Science 2026-04-20T17:30:44Z https://dr.ur.ac.rw/handle/123456789/2798 Role of social work in empowering People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV) for poverty alleviation in Huye district in Rwanda KALINGANIRE, Charles ABSTRACT The world is confronted with different social ills that have exacerbated the situation of categories of people already living in difficult circumstances, particularly those in developing countries. A typical example is that of the people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV) in poverty-stricken families in Rwanda. While undertaking my PhD research, I chose to deal with the poverty phenomenon among these people. My contribution, albeit small, was to explore the impact of social work on empowering the poor PLHIV organised in the form of associations in Huye district to alleviate poverty so as to improve their living conditions. The research was conducted in direct partnership with 13 Social Welfare Workforce (SWW) including 8 Professional Social Workers (PSW) and 13 representatives of 12 targeted cooperative associations. The direct research team worked with 266 associations’ members during 3 consecutive years. Throughout this research, iterative empowerment activities – integrated in a three-stage recurrent process consisting of ‘reflection, data collection and action’– were performed. Overall, the key research findings of this study revealed that poverty combines economic, structural and psychosocial traits and manifests itself in the form of insufficient incomes for family survival and absence of basic needs. In the face of this situation, empowerment and evidence-based social work practice were found to be suitable strategies in tapping the potential and talents of PLHIV for the sustainable improvement of their incomes in the future. It was also found that the placement of the People in Need (PIN) at the helm viii of the battle against poverty is equally fundamental. Hence, PLHIV should not be considered as passive recipients of aid. Instead, they should be empowered to play a caretaker role for themselves. Social work professionals should also be cognisant of their limitations while engaging in almost all aspects associated with PIN. . Ultimately, it was found and this is recommended that a participatory inspiring model privileging the bridging role of the Intermediary Social Work Actors (ISWA) and favoring the involvement of PIN in the problem-solving process may be adopted to mitigate adequately poverty. The model referred to is named EIPPARD: Enlightening and Involving People in Participatory Action Research for Development. Doctoral Thesis 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z https://dr.ur.ac.rw/handle/123456789/2747 Trilingual Glossary of Bank Basic terms (English- French- Kinyarwanda) to bridge the communication gap in bank documents. RUCAMUMAKUBA, François ABSTRACT The necessity of tight cooperation between banking institutions and linguists has intensified considering the changes the banking industry has undergone in recent years, both domestically and internationally. This study was intended to investigate customer‘s perceptions on the prominence of English in bank documents, and to bridge the communication gap that exists between the banks and customers by creating a trilingual glossary of basic terms (English-French-Kinyarwanda). This study relied on different quantitative and qualitative research techniques including questionnaires addressed to both, bank clients and bank personnel, looking at bank communication panels and write down key terms, documentation and exploiting publications of different scholars related to the topic, as well as interviews, which enabled the researcher to create a corpus of 250 basic terms related to banks and mostly needed by bank customers. The use of translation techniques consisting of equivalence, borrowing, paraphrasing and coining new terms, allowed me understanding the bank concepts utilized to find terms especially in Kinyarwanda language which is my main contribution. However, considering that English and French are two languages that share a lot in common, formal equivalence was the main technique used by this study to convey bank terms in both languages. The findings have shown that many bank customers use Kinyarwanda (66.8%) in their daily business in listening, speaking, writing, and reading and confirmed that the use of other language like English presents a barrier to effective communication. Nearly 95.2% agree that using other languages rather than Kinyarwanda puts Kinyarwanda-speaking clients at risk. However, English was proved to be a prioritized language when it comes to Bank services that need form completion. Master's Dissertation 2024-05-23T00:00:00Z https://dr.ur.ac.rw/handle/123456789/2727 ECOWAS and conflict resolution in Burkina Faso. Ruhumuriza, Anselme Over the past decades, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has a mixed record in conflict resolution in Africa. In some cases, ECOWAS demonstrated its capabilities in conflict prevention and peace-making, but its conflict resolution efforts in some countries ended up in failure. This research focuses on the conflict resolution efforts of ECOWAS in Africa, and seeks to explain the following question: why did conflict resolution efforts of ECOWAS ended up in failure in Burkina Faso? Coup d‘état has always been a conflict trigger for the region and pose serious security challenges to member states of ECOWAS. The case of Burkina Faso highlights that among other factors, lack of leadership and collective will is the main factor leading to the failure of conflict resolution of ECOWAS in Burkina Faso. ECOWAS proved in the case to be incapable of intervening effectively in the coups in Burkina Faso. The reasons for this lack of intervening capability include lack of leadership to exercise strategies of solving conflicts, lack of sufficient budget to implement military coercion and meaningful sanctions, institutional bureaucracy of ECOWAS fails to provide early warning of coups,and lack of legal authoritative legitimacy. The study concludes thatmember states of ECOWAS including Burkina Faso should accept the check and balances or simply welcomes the supervision of power politics from ECOWAS. Collective efforts in uprooting terrorism should be a priority.Political inclusivity where all players including oppositions, civil societies and private sectors should play collective role in national development.ECOWAS should ensure the monitoring of constitutions of members and safeguard the implementation of regional standards operational procedures, develop mechanisms of early warnings to mitigate any political breakdown, and revise its treaty to include powers to enforce its decisions through ECOMOG or parliamentary, so as to increases its leadership capability to peacefully resolve disputes. 2024-05-29T00:00:00Z https://dr.ur.ac.rw/handle/123456789/2670 Media Translation: Assessing the translation quality of local online information from Kinyarwanda into French and English for foreign audience: A Case study of igihe.com and bwiza.com Mukundabantu, Ernest News translation is a vital communication tool in the age of information sharing, and the quality of the content has an impact on global relationships. It is therefore crucial to assess the calibre of news text translations. There exist multiple media channels in Rwanda; nevertheless, the problems with translation within these news companies arise while translating from other languages into Kinyarwanda or vice versa. In that vein, I carried out this study to evaluate the accuracy of the translations from Kinyarwanda into French and English of two local online media sources: igihe.com and bwiza.com. My specific objectives included: (i) assessing the translation quality of online information published in French and English by Rwandan journalists; (ii) highlighting the journalist-translators’ challenges among online Rwandan media houses; and (iii) raising awareness of the importance of professionalism in translation among media houses to propose a remedy to overcome them. This study was carried out in the Skopos and communicative framework. Furthermore, I tried to assess the news translation quality of two online media namely Igihe.com and Bwiza.com based on the Translation Quality assessment approach by Farahzad (1992) which suggests criteria to follow. Those criteria include appropriateness, accuracy, style, cohesion, and naturalness. Using this approach, I chose four articles from Igihe.com and Bwiza.com to conduct my assessment. According to Schaffner (1998), evaluation based on translation quality criteria varies following the assessment's goal and the theoretical framework the assessor uses to gauge the translation's quality. To determine if the TT corroborates with the ST one should consider its accuracy, correctness, precision, and fairness or else the actual reproduction of the ST, then compare it to the ST. The findings suggest that there are errors in those translated texts including among others; omission, mistranslation, grammatical errors, addition, and over-translation. I also established that some translation units lack correctness, accuracy, appropriateness, and naturalness. Additionally, based on findings and responses from my population sample, I concluded that there is still the poor quality of translation products of these online media which needs to be addressed. It was also found that due to lack of training in translation, journalists encounter many translation challenges (technical terms, metaphor, idioms) in Kinyarwanda, some of which don’t have techniques to solve them. Master's Dissertation 2024-06-20T00:00:00Z