The culture, traditions, morals, and main beliefs of the grassroots remain a strong pillar in whatever they do.
Consulting them in their natural environment can reveal more than we could know if we only sat in offices waiting for news from people other than the grassroots themselves.
COFAPRI believes that gender imbalance needs to be addressed in economic development, in the context of reducing DRC women’s acute poverty – particularly in remote villages….
Such unbalance often culminates into the horrible story of rapes that we are experiencing today.
COFAPRI co-founder, Bahati Valérie, met up with a former child solder in DRC. The boy told her:
“Most of them joined as fighters while still children… and they had never experienced sexual activity. Now they have guns, they have power over women and girls.
Witch doctors told them to rape many women; old, young and children, so as to get extra power…”
One of the commitments of COFAPRI is to break stigma and silence around rape and domestic violence. This will help to eradicate the culture of violence that has taken deep roots in DRC rural remote villages where we currently work. The women in these villages experience horrendous poverty and human rights infringement on large scale…
In South Kivu, DRC, there are thousands of children born from conflict rape.
Bahati Valérie spoke with some of the mothers:
“We must love our children; they are our children in their innocence.”
People in the remote DRC villages, particularly in South Kivu, have a strong belief in sorcery and witchcraft.
Hence they believe that, when people have contracted AIDS, they have been bewitched. This is why they reject going to hospitals for medical checks.
