We are thrilled to share the success of our recent relief distribution in Rusayo in North Kivu, DR Congo, which directly benefitted 200 displaced households. Working together, with the first $5,000.00 USD raised, ACTION KIVU and AIDPROFEN provided much-needed food and hygiene supplies to families affected by the ongoing conflict in the DR Congo.
📦 What We Distributed:
100 bags of maize flour
14 bags of beans
5 bags of sugar
17 boxes of hygiene pads
200 buckets and more
Our focus was on ensuring that the most vulnerable—including elderly individuals, single women, and unaccompanied children—received the support they needed. The distribution not only addressed immediate needs but also aimed to improve hygiene conditions at the site.
A heartfelt thank you to everyone involved for your dedication and support. Your contribution is changing lives!
Please share this fundraising campaign and encourage others to donate so we can continue to meet these critical needs. DONATE HERE AND NOTE IDP
CLICK HERE to see photos from photojournalist Moses Sawasawa who documented Passy Mubalama and her local AIDPROFEN team in the distribution.
ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN:
Due to the ongoing and escalating war fueled by the fight over the resources we need for our electronics and transition to a green(er) world, millions of Congolese have fled violent attacks on their homes and are living in dire conditions. The estimated number of internally displaced people (IDPs) in the DRC stands at 6.9 million.. They have little or no access to food, water, and basic sanitary needs.
Action Kivu and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative have organized a campaign to bring awareness and help Congolese leaders provide emergency intervention and bring dignity kits, food, and water to at least 1000 households (6+ people per household) that are in IDP camps. The dignity kits are specifically for women and young girls in the IDP camps.
Your donation will save lives: $1,000 feeds 10 families, approximately 60 people, for two weeks. $10 equals one dignity kit for a girl or woman.
Women and girls are in the greatest danger as the most vulnerable to sexual assault when they leave the camps looking for firewood and food.
DONATE HERE AND NOTE IDP :: - PLEASE SHARE!
In addition to providing emergency support, the campaign also invests in long-term peace through investing in healing-informed education at the Congo Peace School, which provides the most at-need children an education rooted in nonviolence with the means to end what has been an endless cycle of violence in the region.
The students learn and put into practice Martin Luther King Jr.’s principles of active peace and nonviolence, and share with us how it is changing their lives, their daily interactions with family and friends. They are understanding equality, and the importance of speaking truth to power, and leading with love.
Congolese peace leaders Passy Mubalamba and Amani Matabaro Tom (see bios below) are the leads for this humanitarian peace effort. Passy will be delivering the kits herself with a team on the ground.
Our goal is to raise at least $100,000, and use this action to raise awareness about the rising tensions and conflict in the region. Funding will be delivered and allocated incrementally in $5k-25k blocks, and we’ll get reports back from the team on how the funds are used. For Action Kivu, 70% of funds raised will go to emergency intervention, and 30% will go to support the long-term peace goals of the Congo Peace School.
Click here to help us meet this critical need, and when you give, please note IDP in your donation. (See donation thermometer below.)
Photo credit: Esther Nsapu
Children in IDP camp.
“All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be... This is the inter-related structure of reality.”
Photo Credit: Esther Nsapu - two Congo Peace School students
UPDATE: FIRST DISTRIBUTION
With the first $5,000.00 earmarked for emergency assistance to those forced to live in IDP camps, our partner Passy organized the distribution for July 4, 2024. Photos and more info coming soon!
Campaign Lead Bios
Amani Matabaro Tom is the Founding Director of Action Kivu and the co-founder and Executive Director of ABFEC-Action Congo (Action for the Welfare of Women and Children in Congo), a Congolese grassroots organization for which Action Kivu, a U.S. based nonprofit organization, raises awareness and funds to provide the resources for ABFEC’s community-based initiatives that foster equality for conflict-affected women and children in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Amani works every day to advance human rights, good governance, and justice in his home country and his work has put him at high risk on a daily basis.
Amani’s ongoing experience working with national and international humanitarian organizations and the UN has exposed him to the misery that successive and ongoing wars have created in his home country. Amani strongly believes in the power of education, and this is why he founded the Congo Peace School Program, which aims at providing war-affected children with quality education based on peace and active nonviolence to ensure the children stay in school and out of local militias and mines, and prepare for transformational leadership in the DRC. The Peace School program was co-founded with the major financial partner the Dillon Henry Foundation and is supported by Action Kivu and its many partners.
Amani, married and the father of 6, has been working tirelessly to address the human and civil rights issues confronted daily within the Eastern Congo war torn region. Amani is an educator who graduated from the Bukavu Higher Institute of Education in English and African Culture, and has worked with several humanitarian and human rights organizations on the ground in the African Great Lakes region. These include TAG & Democracy International Countering Trafficking in Persons Project, the National Opinion Research Centre at the University of Chicago, Jewish World Watch, the International Rescue Committee, Johns Hopkins, the Enough Project Center for American Progress, and the UN Multinational Peacekeeping Forces in the Congo.
Amani is currently a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government with an affiliation to the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI). He comes with a diversified range of academic training from the University of Rhode Island Centre for Peace and Nonviolence in Kingian Nonviolence, Johns Hopkins University’s focus on Health Emergencies in Large Populations, and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative focusing on National NGO Program on Humanitarian Leadership. Amani is a co-author of several articles, including The Bare Minimum: Due Diligence Reporting Shouldn’t Be a Question and Conflict, Displacement and Overlapping Vulnerabilities: Understanding Risk Factors for Gender-Based Violence among Displaced Women in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Learn more about Amani's work at https://www.actionkivu.org/
Passy Mubalama is the Founder and Executive Director of the Action and Development Initiative for the Protection of Women and Children (AIDPROFEN), a nonprofit organization based in the Democratic Republic of Congo. AIDPROFEN’s founding was inspired by her personal experiences reporting on human rights violations from IDP camps in Goma, and now works to promote women’s rights in the eastern DRC.
In addition, she also founded the Education Center on Democracy and Human Rights in the DRC in 2016, which arranges trainings and meetings between the community and local political leaders to progress women’s political engagement. In this interview, Passy reflects on how she started her work in pro-democracy activism and how that led to the founding of AIDPROFEN. She also discusses education as a tool to promote women’s and children’s development in the DRC, as well as the importance of women’s political involvement.