Proposals to review the Democratic Republic of Congo’s constitution to permit President Joseph Kabila to seek a third term of office, if accepted, will only plunge the Congolese further into poverty and insecurity, experts warn.
"There are several robots in the world, but that one which regulates traffic is made in Congo," Thérèse Izayi, a female engineer and the Congolese inventor of two very unusual traffic signals, tells IPS.
The United States’ second-highest court has upheld most of a landmark U.S. law requiring companies to ascertain and publicly disclose whether proceeds from minerals used to manufacture their products may be funding conflict in central Africa.
The World Bank Thursday approved a 73.1-million-dollar grant in support of a controversial giant dam project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Ireland’s former President Mary Robinson has been working hard to include women from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Great Lakes Region in the regional peacebuilding process. Because without their involvement, she says, peace and security in the region will be unrealistic.
Watchdog groups here are warning that a deal has been struck that would see Chinese investors fund a massive, contentious dam on the Congo River, the first phase of a project that could eventually be the largest hydroelectric project in the world.
On Jan. 11, 1994, Romeo Dallaire, force commander of the United Nations Mission in Rwanda, sent a fax to U.N. Headquarters in New York, telling officials there a source close to the government had confided to him that Tutsis were being forced to register themselves in Kigali.
Major manufacturing and business groups on Tuesday urged a court here to roll back a new U.S. regulation that would soon require major manufacturers to ensure that their global supply chains are free of minerals used to fund violence in the Great Lakes region of central Africa.
As U.N. peacekeeping operations assume a more agressive role in conflict zones, the first concrete results came last week when the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) defeated the M23 rebel group after a 20-month-long insurgency.
Countries in Africa’s Great Lakes region are moving too slowly on an international plan to certify the sourcing of “conflict minerals”, researchers here are warning, a failure that could threaten the entire certification process.
Imagine an orphanage where over 300 children born out of rape have been abandoned because of the shame and stigma associated with sexual violence. Imagine a town where, in the last year, 11 infants between the ages of six months and one year, and 59 small children from one to three years old, have been raped.
Western analysts all too often take a distorted and reductionist approach to the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), says Kai Koddenbrock, who analysed more than 50 policy papers for a study published in the journal International Peacekeeping in November 2012.
Despite existing local expertise and strategies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to build peace-supporting structures at the community level, official debates and media coverage continue to focus predominantly on military interventions.
Over 2,000 children are still being used as soldiers by 27 armed groups in North Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo despite efforts by the United Nations Children’s Fund to remove them from the frontlines and return them to their homes.
There are big aspirations for Africa’s largest hydroelectric project, the Inga III that is set to be built in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But analysts are sceptical that such an ambitious project will ever be realised.
At a popular tourist art market in Goma, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, paintings and art sculptures made from bronze, copper, malachite, stone or wood attract visitors. It seems like an ordinary tourist market. But only the regulars know that this is also a black market for ivory products.
A U.S. federal judge has upheld a key regulatory provision aimed at ensuring that the profits from products mined in central Africa are not used to benefit armed groups, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Despite the United Nations' "zero tolerance" policy against sexual violence, there has been a rash of gender-based crimes in several of the world's conflict zones, including South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Northern Uganda, Somalia, the Central African Republic - and, more recently, in politically-troubled Egypt and Syria.
In some Democratic Republic of Congo schools, teachers and senior authorities are using their status to abuse girls who do not know their rights, according to the African Association for the Defence of Human Rights.
If you were forced to flee your home to survive, what would you take? What could you take? Jean Claude “Van Damme” Ndongizimana, 20, escaped from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo with just the bag in which he kept his profits from selling milk and the clothes on his back.
Tuyisenge*, a former teacher from the Democratic Republic of Congo province of North Kivu, sat on a tree stump watching his fellow refugees go about their lives along the terraces of the hillside Kigeme Refugee Camp in southern Rwanda.