“It’s hard to eat here. There are no fields and no food. Life is hard,” said Albertine Nzale, traditional chief of Kinduti, on the outskirts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) capital, Kinshasa.
The village sits at the end of a bumpy track through the savanna outside the nation’s largest city.
There are no grain stores in its straw-roofed huts, no crops or farms along the 35km dirt road through the grassland — just men pushing ancient bikes loaded with sacks of charcoal under a sweltering sun. Albertine, 80, is worried for the village’s future and wants help.
“We don’t have a school or a hospital,” she said. “We need tools and farm machinery to cultivate the land.”
Most people here struggle to find enough food, locals said.
In November last year, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organization said the food crisis in the DR Congo touched a quarter of the vast country’s population — nearly 27 million people.
And those suffering were not just in the country’s conflict zones in the east, but in and around the capital to the west.
Kinduti nurse Neron Mokili said that wild pigs sometimes destroy land around the village — but he also blamed the food shortage on “lazy and impatient” locals who prefer to produce charcoal than till the soil.
Traditional chief Fely Moba, 58, takes a more nuanced position.
“Not everyone in Kinduti owns land they can farm. They have to buy food from the people who do own the land. Except most people haven’t got enough money,” he said.
COVID-19 restrictions — lockdowns, curfews, markets shutting down — have added to the economic woes of this already fragile region.
Last year, the WFP teamed up with UN children’s agency UNICEF and the government to help locals buy food. From March to December last year, they gave at least US$402 in cash to 21,000 households.
The project, which helped feed 130,000 individuals, aimed to “change people’s lives and make them more independent,” WFP director for DR Congo Mathilde Vaultier said.
Many Kinuti locals say the money went into basic necessities — food, schooling for their children, medical treatment. Some, like food stall holder Elisee Nguza, managed to invest some of the cash in more long-term, income-generating activities.
“Things were really difficult during lockdown. There just wasn’t any money around. The WFP cash helped me pay the kids’ school expenses and build my business up,” the 48-year-old mother of five said.
Both Nguza and village nurse Mokili, who also runs a chemist shop, said they have invested in farming.
Pululu Maimona, a farmer who owns 20 hectares of forest and has ambitions of starting pig production, poured his aid cash into a fish-farming project he started in 2019.
“When I emptied the tanks in October, I got 300,000 Congolese francs’ [about US$150] worth of big fish out,” the 63-year-old said, smiling.
“If people work hard, we won’t have this food shortage... I don’t just work for my family. I work for the community. As they say, when one person works, several get to eat,” he said.
The WFP said Nsele District, where Kinduti is situated, faces food “stress,” meaning locals have to sacrifice other basic needs to afford food.
“We’re not strictly talking of famine here,” Vaultier said, but with 75 percent of people “have difficulty” getting enough to eat, “famine is only one step away,”
“Projects like ours try to stop them tipping over that edge,” Vaultier said.
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