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In the UN General Assembly’s review of progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), DRC’s MDG indicators are among the worst in the world – and not only in the east of the country where the world is aware of the conflicts and humanitarian crisis but in the west too. It is well known that DRC has all the makings of providing an economic motor for Africa but the brakes on its progress are, most importantly, governance and state authority, security, and infrastructure, all of which are chronically weak.

Along with being one of Africa’s long-standing chronic crises, the Democratic Republic of Congo is also the world’s largest humanitarian response laboratory. The humanitarian reform agenda, launched in 2005 and piloted in DRC, set out to overhaul the provision of relief, by making humanitarian aid more accountable, predictable, better led, better coordinated and more responsive to identified needs. Since 2005, implementing these reforms in DRC has provided a unique opportunity to gain insight into what works, what does not and where challenges remain.

Annuarite Tagenge, aged 17, is still searching for the surviving members of her family, having spent almost a year walking through the forest to find them. She and her family fled the territory of Dungu in the northeast in December 2008, after attacks by Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels and a subsequent joint Congolese and Ugandan government army offensive to oust the rebels. Tagenge, who was then 16, was wounded and admitted to hospital in Dungu for surgery; along with thousands of civilians, she later fled the hospital for the bush.

Bandundu province, located adjacent to Kinshasa and bordering Angola, has not suffered the same degree of conflict as provinces in eastern DRC; nevertheless, it has been a hotspot for forced migration. Two factors have triggered population movements within Bandundu province: the border situation with Angola during and in the aftermath of the civil war there, and the insecurity surrounding diamond mining on the Angolan side of the border.

Recent research into the role of civil society in DRC suggests that international organisations involved in the Congolese peace process have tended to assume that civil society in the Kivus mirrors its Western counterpart, in which ‘civil society’ represents the needs of the people to the state and keeps the state accountable to the people. Civil society in the Kivus, however, developed quite differently, with today’s distinctive social and bureaucratic structures having been shaped by the colonial administration of earlier years.

Since June 2010, Mukungu1 village in Kalehe, South Kivu, has welcomed 1,150 displaced households fleeing FDLR2 attacks during military operations in the area. A battalion of the national army arrived recently; they have set up checkpoints demanding a fee, do…

The conflict in North Kivu is well documented for the type of pendulum displacement it creates, with families being displaced repeatedly back and forth between locations. In 2009 Concern Worldwide DRC pioneered a new approach in providing not only non-food items (NFIs) – the routine response to displacements – but also seeds and tools and support for primary education using a cash voucher market approach.