About me and what I do

I plan and manage events across Rwanda: conferences and summits, weddings, shows and launches, and the private functions in between.

Kigali is my base and where most of the work happens, but an event an hour outside the city is the same work with a longer journey, and I would rather travel than decline something for being outside a map.

Where it started

I studied at the Rwanda School of Creative Arts and Music. I went in for the art and came out knowing something about myself that I had not gone looking for: the part that held my attention was never the stage. It was who books the room, who tells the performers what time to arrive, and what happens when half of that falls through on the afternoon of the show.

I became the student who organised. Small things first, then larger ones, and by the time I left it was not a favour I was doing anybody. It was the work. The school still brings me in: I work with RSAM on the planning and organisation of its events, and on the business side of what it teaches, which is the part of a creative education that is easiest to leave out and hardest to manage without.

What I carried furthest from that training was not a technique. It was what I learned about how talent is found and developed, here and across the continent, and about the conditions it needs in order to become a career rather than a season.

What the artists taught me

Most of what I know about events I learned standing beside people who were about to perform.

An audience judges an evening by how it felt. A performer judges it by whether the sound was right, whether the running order held, and whether anybody told them what was happening. Those are not the same job, and an evening that serves only the first of them is one the artists do not come back to. I plan for both.

That is how the work grew. Artists I knew asked me to run their events, their events got bigger, and some of them were no longer in Rwanda.

The day itself

Every occasion has a shape. Something builds, something arrives, and the moment it arrives is what people carry home. Getting there is a question of order and timing: what is scheduled when, who is on before whom, how long a room is asked to sit still, when the food comes. I settle as much of that as I can well before the day, because the alternative is settling it on the night, in a full room, with incomplete information.

Then something goes wrong anyway. A supplier does not arrive, the programme overruns, someone who was to speak is not coming. What I am relied on for is what happens next: working out the alternative, saying it out loud, and keeping enough people calm enough to carry it out.

Some clients want all of that, from the brief to the last vehicle leaving. Others want one part of it taken off their hands. I take on both, and a first enquiry does not need to know yet which it is.

Getting in touch

The most useful thing to send is the short version: the occasion, approximate dates, the location, the number of guests, and what you would like me to take on. Email hello@natashaumrungi.com, message me on WhatsApp, or use the contact form.