Frank Gakwaya Abaho

Frank Gakwaya Abaho is a development finance practitioner with over seven years’ of diverse experience in public relations and communications, corporate governance, and program development, implementation, and evaluation. Frank Gakwaya Abaho currently serves as a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) officer at the Development Bank of Rwanda (BRD), where his main role is to research, document, and communicate project- and sector-specific development impact generated from BRD’s financing interventions. These interventions are aimed at enhancing accountability, identifying challenges, and providing crucial policy recommendations in fast-tracking the bank’s contribution to socioeconomic development and poverty reduction in Rwanda. Frank holds a Bachelor of Science in Applied Statistics from the National University of Rwanda(Africa) and a Master of Business Administration with a focus in Project Management from the University of Kigali. Upon completion of the Mandela Washington Fellowship, Frank plans to utilize his passion for data journalism to implement a project called ‘In4stats (R),’ a web- and mobile-based directory (in Kinyarwanda and English) that aggregates, simplifies, and uses data visualization, such as information graphics, as a storytelling tool to disseminate information in a user-friendly and easy-to-understand format. The project will focus on various national programs and statistical surveys, normally released as technical documents that are difficult to comprehend by most Rwandans, especially youth.