Who We Are
Founded and led by people with lived experience of displacement, working across child protection, education, sport and livelihoods in Kirehe District, Rwanda.
Our Vision
We envision communities in Kirehe District where displacement is no longer a barrier to opportunity — where every child, regardless of their background, can access the care, education and support they need to thrive.
Our Mission
Through integrated programming in early childhood development, education, sport, youth empowerment and livelihoods — delivered by a refugee-led team with deep roots in the communities we serve — we create the conditions for talent to become a livelihood.
Kirehe District hosts one of Rwanda's largest refugee populations — tens of thousands of people, the majority children and youth, living in protracted displacement. Many have been born in camps, attended Rwandan schools and built lives here. Yet structural barriers mean that talent and hard work are routinely insufficient to overcome the gap between potential and opportunity.
Host-community families face their own version of this gap: under-resourced schools, limited childcare options that constrain mothers' economic participation, and few structured pathways for young people into sustainable livelihoods.
The opportunity gap is not a gap in talent. It is a gap in the systems, structures and support that allow talent to become a livelihood.
Refugee Horizons was founded in 2022 by Astere Tuyikorere — a person with lived experience of displacement — on a single conviction: that the gap between talent and opportunity in displacement contexts is not inevitable. It is a structural problem, and structural problems have structural solutions.
We started with Itetero Daycare, our flagship Early Childhood Development programme, which has now reached more than 247 children and their families. From that foundation, we have built an integrated model that works across the full arc of a person's development.
We do not design programmes for communities. We design them with and from within them.
Three principles that shape everything we do.
Our leadership has lived experience of displacement. Proximity to communities is our greatest asset — it shapes how we design, deliver and evaluate every programme.
We work across the full arc of a person's development — from early childhood through to employment and entrepreneurship. Each programme area reinforces the others.
Our programmes serve both refugee and host-community families. Social cohesion is not a side effect — it is a design principle. Inclusive communities are more stable and more resilient.
By 2031, Refugee Horizons will have supported at least 500 children, youth and families in Kirehe District to move from protection and vulnerability to measurable self-reliance, through integrated programming that develops talent, builds skills, creates economic opportunity and strengthens the communities in which they live.