In January 2008 NPA MA Sudan got message from NPA Head Office in Oslo to be prepared to start a project in Rwanda. Based on this message the Programme did its preparations and planning. On the 1st of May NPA MA Sudan got a confirmed message from NPA Head Office to support Rwandan National Demining Office (NDO) with mechanical demining operations in Rwanda, funded by German Federal Foreign Office and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
At the end of May a recce was done by NPA Head Office Desk Officer – Rune K Andresen, Mine Wolf Operations Manager – Marty Steel and NPA MA Sudan Deputy Programme Manager – Kjell Ivar Breili. The intention for this recce was to get hands on information on the task, meet stakeholders, and gather information to be able to write a Project Plan and deploy the team.
Based on the recce, Kjell Ivar Breili was appointed Project Manager for the Rwandan Project. Within mid June the Project Plan was distributed to NPA Head Office in Oslo, to Rwandan NDO, NPA Rwanda and internally in NPA MA Sudan. The plan defined which responsibility each stakeholder in the Project had. Coordination was made on e-mail between the stakeholders.
On 30th of June the Mine Wolf machine had its last operational day in Sudan. It was then taken to NPA MA Sudan compound in Yei, for maintenance and preparations, by the team that was appointed to be operating the machine in Rwanda. On the 15th of July the team started to move from Yei to Kigali.