Facts
A total of
592,420
people in need received our assistance in 2017.
Humanitarian overview
The population of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) has had to endurepolitical instability, ethnic rivalry and violent conflict for 20 years. Still, there are few indications that the long-standingcrisis will come to an end anytime soon.
The humanitarian situation in DR Congo is expanding into a regional crisis. Today, over 4.54 million people are displaced, and many have fled to Angola, Zambia and Tanzania. Since December of 2017, armed conflict in eastern Congo’s Ituri region has forced 50,000 people to flee to Uganda. Today, over 800,000 Congolese refugees seek protection in neighbouring countries.
Meanwhile,13.1 million people are in need of assistance inside the country where 7.7 million are acutely food insecure. 4.6 million people are malnourished.
Many people are in desperate need of protection across the country. In the North Kivu region, thousands have experienced pillaging, extortion and have had their homes burned down.
People we helped in DR Congo in 2017
NRC's operation
The crisis in DR Congo receives little international attention and is extremely underfunded. As a result, organisations, including our team, struggle to support people affected by the violence. When the UN declared DR Congo an L3 crisis, its highest level of emergency, it spurred hope that more resources and capacity to assist people in DR Congo would follow, but little has been received.
In 2018, our staff have been present in all of the largest conflict areas: North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri, Kasai, and Tanganyika.
Education
We provide quality education in safe and protected environments. Our education activities:
- provide accelerated learning opportunities to let out-of-school children catch up with their peers and reintegrate into the formal school system
- protect children and youth, both physically and psychologically, to create a sense of normalcy and routine
- train teachers, education authorities and other education stakeholders on psychosocial support, peace education, class management, prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse and good governance in school management
- support the rehabilitation and construction of classrooms
- provide youth with education to enhance their livelihood skills and guide them towards a profession
Information, counselling and legal assistance (ICLA)
Our livelihood and food security teams support displaced people with food assistance. Our food security teams offer:
- food and household items for people in acute need of food
- agricultural kits in order to restore the resilience capacities of the most vulnerable households
- assistance on land tenure for internally displaced people and returnees, in close collaboration with our ICLA teams
- training sessions on livelihood opportunities and productivity to ensure that people better adapt and withstand future shocks and crises
- support to small breeding activities, like guinea pigs, chicken and rabbits
- various Income Generating Activities (IGA) accompanied with business management training
- support to vulnerable households through unconditional and unrestricted cash grants in order for them to meet their basic needs, other than food
Livelihoods and food security
NRC has an extensive experience in providing emergency and non-emergency assistance in Food Security in DRC. Our main activities are:
- improving food diversity both in emergency response with mobile teams and for longer term food security assistance
- cash based interventions for improved food security
- agricultural assistance, including seeds, tools and livestock
- promoting entrepreneurship by providing trainings on income generating activities, to ensure that people better adapt and withstand future shocks and crises
Shelter and settlements
So far this year, our shelter teams have:
- established partnerships with donors including UNHCR and OFDA to strengthen our shelter programmes
- sought to define and propose durable solutions to households in provinces where displacement camps are closing down
- provided cash and technical expertise for the provision of shelter to families who return home
- assessed needs of health centres in conflict areas
- built and rehabilitated classrooms and water points for displaced children
- collaborated with our ICLA team to ensure that every household's property rights are respected and upheld
In addition to traditional food assistance, ourteams provide:
- non-food items(NFIs) through cash distribution and/or market fairs (using e-voucher technology) for displaced and conflict-affected populations. We also provide sensitisation activities on the proper usage of NFIs, and we follow-upafter distributions to evaluate the impact of our intervention
Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) promotion
Our WASH teams:
- rehabilitate damaged and weak water facilities
- construct and repair water points and latrines
- spread knowledge about safe hygiene practices to people affected by displacement, both in communities and schools
- bring about spontaneous and long-term changes to sanitation practices through the Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach to mitigating open defecation
- distribute hygiene kits and campaign to promote the use of safe water containers for both water transportation and storage
Humanitarian mediation and protection
Our Humanitarian Mediation and Protection projects seek to contribute to improved protection of civilians through humanitarian mediation processes. We aim to achieve conflict prevention and mitigation. The activities include:
- undertaking conflict sensitive, gender and protection analyses
- supporting dialogue processes and humanitarian mediation processes
- training of national and international actors working to protect civilians
About NRC in (country)
- Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO)
- Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development (DG DEVCO)
- Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (NMFA)
- Norwegian Agency for Development cooperation (Norad)
- Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida)
- United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)
- United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
- United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)
- Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC)
