DRC refugee surge strains humanitarian support in Burundi and Uganda

When gunshots rang out near her home in the Congolese city of Uvira last month, Mapendo knew it was time to leave. Gathering her children and other family members, she crossed the fast-flowing Rusizi river into neighbouring Burundi, joining desperate throngs fleeing the violence gripping swathes of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.  

Today, Mapendo and her family are sleeping under open skies near a sports stadium-turned-makeshift refugee shelter in the northwestern Burundian town of Rugombo,

“The outfit I am wearing is all I have,” says Mapendo, clad in a black shirt and brightly patterned skirt. “This is also the case of my children.”  As a refugee, her last name is not being used for her protection.

Months of fighting in eastern DRC have uprooted hundreds of thousands of people – in a country where millions have already been displaced by other upheavals. Of the tens of thousands seeking safety in neighbouring countries, Burundi has taken in the lion’s share – nearly 66,000 Congolese refugees and asylum seekers to date. Most of them are women, children and the elderly. 

“In just a matter of weeks the number of new arrivals has skyrocketed, doubling at an alarming pace,” says Dragica Pajevic, World Food Programme (WFP) Deputy Regional Director for Eastern Africa.

Working with Burundian authorities and humanitarian partners, WFP is delivering life-saving food assistance to the Congolese newcomers, who are hosted in existing transit centres and temporary reception sites, including schools, churches and recreational spaces. They will then be relocated to refugee camps and other permanent sites.

But their sheer numbers – with WFP’s own caseload, including long-time refugees in Burundi, doubling to 120,000 – are stretching resources to the limit.  Already, WFP has been forced to sharply reduce food rations for the refugees. Without new funding, it may be forced to cut food assistance altogether in July.

“The international community must act now to prevent an escalating hunger crisis,” says WFP's Pajevic .

An escalating hunger crisis

Nearby Uganda is also taking in thousands of Congolese refugees, who share horrific stories. Muisa – real name withheld – managed to cross the border with the two youngest of her six children, after escaping rampaging armed fighters in DRC’s main northeastern city of Goma.

“Gunshots echoed through the market” in Goma, where she sold fish, Muisa recalls. “People fell, including a friend shot dead right behind me.”

Muisa managed to survive the shootout, but she was raped by fighters. Her husband was killed in their home. Her four older children remain with her sister in Goma.

“Now, all I long for is peace - a place where my children can go to school, where fear doesn’t shadow every step,” says Muisa, now living at a refugee settlement in southwestern Uganda.

Another Goma resident, Amadi, also fled to Uganda with his family. The father of six, who sold bottles of petrol for a living, recounts the hunger and fear that gripped the city during recent fighting.

“Schools closed, streets emptied and I couldn’t sell,” Amadi says. The family survived on scraps of food from neighbours, before heading by foot and car to southwestern Uganda.

Amadi and other Congolese refugees are packing Ugandan transit and refugee hubs, their numbers far exceeding housing capacities.  WFP is delivering hot meals and high-energy biscuits to the newcomers – on top of our assistance to some 1.4 million refugees already in Uganda.

But here, too, funding shortages are curtailing this aid. Uganda’s overall fast-growing population of 1.7 million refugees, reliant on humanitarian intervention and support, is the highest in Africa, increasing the urgency for sustained assistance.

“This overwhelming influx is straining our resources beyond their limits," says Pauline Irenabina, the Government of Uganda's refugee desk officer in the southwest. "We are struggling to provide adequate accommodation for everyone.”  WFP's reduced food distributions cannot meet the spiking numbers, she adds, and could be "pushing us to a potential crisis." 

Refugee Amadi, whose family is sheltered at the same settlement as Muisa, hopes for life beyond daily survival. “Pray for peace," he says, "so we might rise again.”  

Uncertain future

In the Burundian town of Rugombo - located in northwestern Cibitoke province bordering eastern DRC – more than 40,000 refugees are now packed in blue and white tents lining the town’s sports stadium. The ground is scattered with plastic water jugs and newcomers’ belongings. Children kick up clouds of red dust as they jump rope. 

More refugees arrive daily, some weighed down with hastily packed bundles and suitcases. Most, like Mapendo, however, were forced to flee with nothing at all.

Along with shelters, the influx of newcomers has overwhelmed local health facilities, in a country grappling with diseases like cholera, measles and especially malaria.

As WFP food trucks roll in, refugees and local community members help unload the heavy bags of food, moving them to storage rooms provided by local authorities. At a makeshift kitchen nearby, workers stir giant vats of rice and split peas over open fires. Later, the food will be dished out for the two meals a day WFP provides the hungry newcomers.

But the WFP assistance and local good will are not enough to keep pace with surging demand. “The meals are so small, I leave my portion to my children,” says Mapendo, adding she has no other means to access food, medicines and other essentials for her children.

Congolese refugee Promesse and her three children face the same difficult conditions.

“We desperately need assistance,” says Promesse who, like Mapenda, hails from Uvira, in DRC’s South Kivu province. She and her husband separated as they fled the fighting in their homeland. But she pushed on, trekking three days and taking a boat across the Rusizi to Burundi.

“We get food, but it is not enough,” with the influx of new arrivals, says Promesse.  “There are many mosquitoes and our children are at risk of malaria.

For now, she and her children are sheltered at a school. She doubts she will return home anytime soon - and fears what will happen next.

“When classes resume,” she says, “we will be forced to sleep outside.”

Learn more about WFP's work in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda