27 July 2022
Objective: to be ready for the rainy season. In the highest points of Uvira, a town in the province of South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo, located on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, our humanitarian team is currently building 150 mud houses. Following the provision of land by the local authorities, construction has now started on these sites.
For the whole team of the Luxembourg Red Cross Humanitarian Aid, “it is a real relief to know that these families who have lost everything will not spend the next rainy season in their deteriorated emergency shelters”.
The project was launched two years ago to help households in Uvira who were affected by flooding and rising waters in Lake Tanganyika, which ravaged their town twice, in 2020 and 2021.
Since these catastrophic climate change events, hundreds of homes have been lost and individuals are living in emergency shelters on spontaneous sites.
To enable them to recover a dignified and safe habitat, a scalable shelter model made of adobe bricks has been designed by the humanitarian teams of the Luxembourg Red Cross. A methodology based on the community approach, with the participation of groups of beneficiaries and supervised by Red Cross volunteers was developed.
This project, financed by the Government of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, is the result of collaboration between the Luxembourg Red Cross and the Congolese Red Cross in South Kivu.