Support the Protection of indiginous people in DRC

Trying the Community driven programme for Indigenous people in Tanganyika Province, DRC,

“Indigenous people have their own perception and understanding about development, let us know aggress them with our own ideas but we should support their initiatives on their own way”.

Many projects have totally failed in Tanganyika especially those focusing on Pygmies, and many actors have been disappointed. People come with their projects and want to impose them to Pygmies, people come with their projects and want to benefit Pygmies without consulting them, people want to impose development to Pygmies and at the end nothing has moved positively.

Now, here we are come up with an approach of engaging Pygmies on what can be done for their well-being. We have deployed four among our volunteers to build strong relationships with the Twaa Communities in order to come up with an approach which can work better for development actors.

We have realized that Pygmies contrary to what actors in NGOs are thinking, Pygmies have better ideas and great suggestions in order to solve some of their challenges, and things work very well when we let them put in place their own solutions. They do not need solutions coming outside, what they is the necessary in order to solve their issues. If you do not come in this way, they will listen to you, and then do contrary to what you wanted and in most cases they will disappear.

As we wait for the funding in order to fully implement what we have observed, we believe this may help some actors to plan better on how to engage Pygmies in development.

Thanks

Let us integrate Indigenous people in our development plans

Our activities in Tanganyika and Equateur Provinces are becoming the role model of what we should do in order to end exclusion against Twaa (indigenous people) who are highly discriminated.

First of all they are now included in our staff members at the Provincial levels, so that they can shape our programs in order to take into account the Twaa Community.

Secondly all our interventions are done in the Twaa Communities and then ask other communities especially Bantu to access services in the Twaa Communities. This is unique, most of actors were putting services in Bantu Communities and then ask Twaa to go and access these services, and we are also advocating others to change the approaches.

Thirdly we are now involving them in development activities such as farming and agriculture among others. We are trying to organize them into groups which can help to exercise leadership roles and play various at the community levels.

Twaa people in DRCongo

Even if we do not have clear statistics of the population in the Democratic Republic of Congo, certain statistics do estimate Twaa at 20% of the entire DRCongo population. They are known as the indigenous communities. They lived on hunting and collecting fruits from the trees in the forests.

However as Bantu and other Ethnic groups kept on growing, they exploited the forest and created a serious competitions to access and control the forests which later became mostly exploited by the Bantu at the expenses of Twaa. As consequences Twaa lost their livelihood activities as Forests were highly attacked and destroyed by other ethnic groups.

Colonial strategies focused on Bantu and other ethnic groups and totally left a side Twaa Communities who only stayed in their forests up to now.

On top of that the Climate Change also caused a big problem to the Twaa Communities which created hit that caused forests to dry up, and also floods which destroyed places they used to stay, this also killed so many wide animals and destroyed completely many species which were important for their survival.

Now, they cannot any more live on the forests, but at the same time they have not accessed education opportunities, they did not acquire skills. In order to survive they attacked other ethnic groups and looted their things such crops in their plantation and animals. This is one among the causes of violence in Tanganyika Province between Twaa and Bantu. The second cause is the relationship between people, Twaa women find it easier to get married to Bantu men because of economic opportunities but Twaa men have problems to marry Bantu women. This is another main cause of the conflict.

Beyond the services in order to skill Twaa communities and capacitate them on livelihood activities, we are also involved in various research and advocacy activities.