Attachments
Introduction
The crisis in the Kasais region of the Democratic Republic of Congo is first and foremost a child protection crisis, one of the worst in the world. Children make up more than two million of the 3.8 million people in need of humanitarian assistance and protection across the region.
Humanitarian emergencies can have catastrophic effects on children, exacerbating existing forms of violence and making them more vulnerable to exploitation, including being recruited into armed forces or armed groups, being sexually abused and being trafficked.
In August 2017, UNICEF counted almost 2,000 children who had been members of the militias in Kasai, although the actual numbers are likely much higher. An estimated 60 percent of the militia members in the region were under the age of 18, with the majority younger than 15, and some as young as 5 years old.
In the DRC as a whole in 2017, at least 3,270 grave violations against children were documented, a 245 percent increase in just two years.
The long-term impact of children being exposed to violence for so long is difficult to overstate. It has far-reaching effects on children’s social, emotional, cognitive and spiritual well-being and development. It interferes with their ability to learn and to lead healthy lives into adulthood.
As a Christian organisation, World Vision believes that every child deserves life in all its fullness. We believe children should be heard, and their views and voices included in decisions that affect them. We hear from children themselves how important this is to them. And this is why World Vision shared a number of children’s stories ahead of the Humanitarian Conference on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in Geneva in April 2018. Children told us that they were tired of violence and hunger, tired of fear and uncertainty. Rarely are they asked how conflict affects them and what would make their lives better.
However, despite World Vision’s efforts to make decision makers listen to children, the appeal for the DRC remains critically underfunded, and these children’s stories have been largely disregarded by the international community. As of June, less than 8 percent of children and families targeted for protection programming in the Kasais have received the support they need.
We have passed the one-year mark since the international community began responding to the crisis in the Kasais, and once again World Vision is putting the voices of children forward, sharing their continuing struggles with the effects of violence, their concerns and their needs, but also their hopes for the future.
We have passed the one-year mark since the international community began responding to the crisis in the Kasais, and once again World Vision is putting the voices of children forward, sharing their continuing struggles with the effects of violence, their concerns and their needs, but also their hopes for the future.
This report is based on interviews with more than 100 children and additional focus groups with 250 children and adults in the Kasais. The stories children shared with World Vision are alarming, but not, unfortunately, surprising. Twenty percent of the children we spoke to had been recruited into the militias, almost all of them coercively. Twenty-three percent of children lost either a parent or sibling due to the violence, or saw them die from starvation or disease while hiding in the bush. And whether it was with their militia cohort, or with their family and neighbours fleeing violence, all but one child we spoke to has a story of being displaced by the conflict at least once. Almost 40 percent of children we interviewed are out of school.
For many children, the distress of violence and armed conflict has been exacerbated by being on the move, away from their homes. Their education has been interrupted, and families are struggling to feed themselves as they return to fallow fields and find their livestock seized or killed. Any recovery is jeopardized by a security situation that isn’t restored, and a pervasive fear that the militias will return and families will need to flee for their lives once again.
Children are scared, lonely, and isolated, hungry, and out of school. Their needs are immense and the response to date pales in comparison. Here are their stories.