Ministryupdates#1.html

* More than 2.5 million people have been driven from their homes, many of them beyond the reach of humanitarian agencies.

Oxfam, an English based NGO operating in Congo, has published a criticizing report on the war in Congo: ”The international community is essentially ignoring what has been deemed ‘Africa’s first world war’. The DRC remains a forgotten emergency. Falling outside of the media spotlight and experiencing persistent shortfalls in pledged humanitarian aid, the population of the DRC has been largely abandoned to struggle for their own survival“. Back in 2001, Oxfam notes the following facts: (some numbers may be out of date and have gotten worse, but the sheer scale of these numbers alone is shocking).

More than two million people are internally displaced; more than 3/4 of the dead and about 90% of the internally displaced have been in eastern DRC. More than one million of the displaced have received absolutely no outside assistance.

It is estimated that up to 2.5 million people in DRC have died since the outbreak of the war, many from preventable diseases. Of these, about 90% of

At least 37 per cent of the population, approximately 18.5 million people, have no access to any kind of formal health care.

16 million people have critical food needs.

There are 2,056 doctors for a population of 50 million; of these, 930 are in Kinshasa, the capital city of Congo.

Infant mortality rates in the east of the country have in places reached 41 per cent per year.

Severe malnutrition rates among children under five have reached 30 per cent in some areas.

National maternal mortality is 1837 per 100,000 live births, one of the worst in the world. Rates as high as 3,000/100,000 live births have been recorded in eastern DRC.

DRC is ranked 152nd on the UNDP Human Development index of 174 countries: a fall of 12 places since 1992.

2.5 million people in Kinshasa live on less than US$1 per day. In some parts of eastern DRC, people are living on US$0.18 per day.

80 per cent of families in rural areas of the two Kivu Provinces in Eastern Congo have been displaced at least once in the past five years.

There are more than 10,000 child soldiers. Over 15 per cent of newly recruited combatants are children under the age of 18. A substantial number are under the age of 12.