Our "why"

Congo Peace Academy is a peace and leadership education center on Idjwi Island with ongoing activities in Goma, in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since 2018, when we launched our first peace project, funded by the Davis Projects for Peace through the University of Rochester, we have focused on promoting youth empowerment, community peace, social cohesion, and gender equality. We implement our projects through an inclusive, community-based approach to peacebuilding. We design our programs based on a deep historical understanding of our society to help reduce ethnic violence and prevent violent conflicts at the family level, in our schools, and in our communities.

As a result, youth join rebel groups and get involved in multiple illegal activities for economic reasons, becoming entangled in crimes that ravage their homelands and leave hundreds dead. Young people thus become tools exploited by politicians and rebel groups to threaten peace in the region, as most youths are unemployed and are easy targets for political manipulation in exchange for money.  We thought that keeping the young people busy and giving them entrepreneurial skills would change their lives, so we started the project. Based on the need we accessed during the 2018 project, we decided to formalize and officially register our initiative as a peace center in 2021.  Today, the center makes a difference through workshops, youth empowerment programs, and conflict resolution training. This year, we hosted or co-sponsored 40 workshops involving hundreds of participants, and the impact continues to grow. 

At the Congo Peace Academy, we are committed to creating a generation of young people dedicated to positive change and peace for themselves, their communities, and the world. We have seen schools whitewash historical injustices and inequalities. Some have even created the illusion that people become wealthy and successful only of their own volition. They deliberately obscure the vast disparities that provide effortless paths to success for some while erecting barriers to advancement for others. As a consequence, they blame the poor for their condition. We confront these stereotypes.

The practices we encourage in our peace center unlearn and disrupt the narratives that justify injustice and inequality and rationalize war. At one time or another, on television, in movies, in our families, in our schools, etc., every child has learned a story filled with narratives that glorify violence and war. As children, we may have learned that violence is sometimes justified or even deserved. We were inspired by war heroes when we read about them in history books. Today, we create, play, and encourage war simulations in video games at home and at school. And, while our governments invest in military-industrial complexes, our religious leaders give their blessing to fighters and soldiers. Our political leaders craft lies that justify war, and the media is an echo chamber.  So it can be said that while our institutions produce countless rationalizations for injustice and inequality, we also construct a set of mental maps that end up feeding our subconscious with images that rationalize violent behavior. This is especially the case for children and adolescents. 

Here are a few examples of what we are doing at Congo Peace Academy to disrupt these narratives. 

• We demand to transform the teaching of history in schools. 

• We discredit war propaganda and myths that justify violence. 

• We disprove the threats. 

• We make it clear that violence is not innate and that war is not inevitable. 

• We expose the deceptive motivations and tactics of corrupt leaders who rationalize violence. 

• We deconstruct nationalistic ideologies and the politics of division. 

• We combat hate crimes and humanize marginalized groups. 

• We speak out against the misuse of religion for discriminatory purposes, especially within our faith community.