First Lady Jeannette Kagame attended the Young Leaders’ Prayer Breakfast on Sunday.
KIGALI – A generation can build successful careers, lead institutions and drive a country’s ambitions forward, yet still fail at one of the most important responsibilities of building strong families grounded in values.
That was the message from First Lady Jeannette Kagame’s to Rwanda’s young leaders on Sunday, during a Young Leaders’ Prayer Breakfast under the theme “Instilling Godly Values in Leadership.”
Mrs Kagame invoked Psalm 127:1: “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain,” urging them to look beyond professional achievements and confront the foundations on which their lives, relationships and families are built.
“We are the generation that believes in effort. We plan, we strategies, we work hard, we build. And yet the scripture is telling us plainly that without the Lord, as the foundation, all that labour, however sincere, however skilled, is in vain,” she said.
She emphasized that the “house” is not simply a physical structure or an institution. It is the family, and, ultimately, the society and nation that families help shape.
Rwanda Begins at Home
First Lady Jeannette Kagame speaking to Rwanda’s young leaders on Sunday.
Mrs Kagame warned that families are facing pressures that demand greater intentionality, particularly as attitudes towards marriage, commitment and parenting change.
She noted that commitment is increasingly postponed until other milestones have been achieved, while some people have come to desire the symbols of family life without fully embracing the responsibility behind them.
“Some want children, but not the daily and glamorous work of parenting that raising a child actually requires. Some want a wedding, the day, the dress, the celebration, more than they want the marriage it’s supposed to begin,” she said.
She also urged couples to recognize that relationships are often damaged not by dramatic events, but by repeated small acts of criticism, anger, withdrawal and silence.
“Relationships don’t usually break in big moments; they wear down in small ones. What we need isn’t more scrutiny, it’s more safety with each other. Marriage is ministry and your home is an altar,” she emphasized.
According to the First Lady, building a family requires the same deliberate effort that leaders devote to their careers and public responsibilities. The daily choices made within a home can either strengthen or weaken its foundation.
“Our role in creating healthy, happy homes is not passive. We don’t get to wait for the right circumstances, the right season or the pressures to ease before we start building one,” she noted.
A Marriage Built Through Learning and Faith
Eric Munyemana giving a testimony of how he has navigated marriage with his wife.
The experience of Eric and Bonita Munyemana provided a practical example of the work under contention.
Married for 28 years and parents of four children, the couple said their family had been shaped by deliberate decisions to learn, communicate and grow together.
Munyemana said they had grown up seeing struggling families and decided they did not want to reproduce the same patterns in their own home. But their own marriage also went through difficult moments.
At one point, he said, a clash of personalities forced him to confront his own shortcomings. Rather than allowing the disagreement to break the relationship, the couple sought guidance and began learning how to understand each other better.
They sought advice from other couples, churches and organizations, read books and worked to understand their different personalities. Faith became another anchor, with the couple praying together, reading the Bible and learning to apologize when they were wrong.
Bonita Munyemana.
They also made difficult choices around parenting. When work began limiting the time they could spend with children, Bonita eventually gave up her job, despite the financial implications, to become more present in their lives.
The family created regular moments to talk and play together, while the parents deliberately modelled the values they wanted their children to learn.
“When children feel loved, it builds their self-esteem and gives them the capacity to reject bad things. Please feel encouraged because everything can change as long as you still breathe. Please hang in there,” Munyemana advised.
From Stronger Homes to Stronger Leadership
Guests arrive for the Young Leaders’ Prayer Breakfast.
Monique Mukamana, the Child Rights Protection and OVC Program Manager at the National Child Development Agency (NCDA) said the challenges facing families also have implications for children and the wider society.
“We receive problems that affect children and that is why we believe strongly in services such as Early Childhood Development (ECD), where we can intervene early, support families and create the conditions needed to raise children who are better prepared to grow, learn and thrive,” she said.
For the First Lady, the responsibility is shared across families, communities, churches, institutions and leaders.
Rwanda has entrusted young people with many positions of responsibility, she noted, but education and professional achievement alone are not enough to prepare them for the responsibilities of leadership and family life.
“Education helps you at work but it’s not all that is required to build a strong family. There are other values that are needed. You should approach family life with the same seriousness with which you approach careers and the country’s development ambitions,” she said.
Drawing on the French expression “le bonheur se crée” (happiness is created) she said healthy families require deliberate daily choices rather than waiting for perfect circumstances.
“A house can be built with the finest materials and the hardest work and still collapse if it was never built on the right ground to begin with. Before building institutions, careers and national prosperity, we must first pay attention to the,” she concluded.
