Sometimes good things come out of extremely dark episodes.

ActionAid is celebrating today as the amazing Maggy Barankitse has been announced as the winner of The Guardian’s first ever Achievement in International Development Award.

Transforming lives

Maggy is very close to ActionAid’s heart. In the early 1990s, amidst the devastation of genocide, Maggy saved and then transformed the lives of thousands of Burundi’s traumatised children.

Two of those children were Lysette and Lydia, the daughters of Maggy’s best friends (also ActionAid workers) who were butchered in front of her eyes.

On 24 October 1993 a Tutsi mob came to Ruyigi, where Maggy lived. Despite being a Tutsi herself, Maggy was stripped naked, beaten and tied up as a so-called ‘collaborator’. Her Hutu neighbours, including Lysette and Lydia’s parents, were murdered.

As they were about to die, they begged that Maggy be allowed to take the children. Some small spark of humanity prevailed and the little girls’ lives were spared. She has raised them as her own daughters ever since.

Maggy said: “Before Lysette’s mother died, she begged me to love Lydia and Lysette as if they were my own daughters and I swore to do my best to give the girls a good life.

“I also made up my mind to take care of all the other children who survived the massacre.”

Since then Maggy has become a mother to over 30,000 children, including 10,000 orphans of war and AIDS through her Maison Shalom project.

Her work has changed an entire town and its surrounding environment.

Building a community

In Ruyigi she has set up homes for orphans, building a bakery, cinema, garage, hotel and several other businesses that employ them once they are grown up, letting them earn a wage.

Many have gone on to university. Lysette will shortly be studying law in Geneva via a scholarship programme.

Maggy has also been instrumental in building the local hospital, opening a mother and baby clinic and encouraging the national bank to set up a local branch.

And when you visit Ruygi, the infrastructure and its difference to other towns in Burundi is obvious.

Maggy doesn’t believe in short term interventions – and neither does ActionAid.

What’s more, she is absolutely clear that her work is not just about helping individual children.

She says that without helping the whole community, Maison Shalom will achieve nothing – an attitude that chimes with that of ActionAid.

Maggy’s philosophy is not to help people out, but to “give people a chance to hold their life in their own hands”.

The absolute force of nature that is Maggy Barankitse – intelligent, articulate and absolutely passionate in her desire to improve people’s lives – made her an obvious winner of the Guardian’s award.

She won it by public vote after being shortlisted by a panel of development experts and The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger.

“Maggy has been a key mover in bringing peace and a future to Ruyigi,” said ActionAid’s Jane Moyo, who nominated Maggy for the award. “What she has achieved has been miraculous.

“Amongst an incredibly strong shortlist, she was a worthy and inspirational winner. ActionAid is very proud to be associated with her.”