Goma: Support for unemployed women through training in cutting and sewing and the processing of sausages

The 2024 humanitarian response plan highlights the fact that 6 million women and 6.8 million girls are in need in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In North Kivu’s province, there was a 37% increase in cases of gender-based violence in the first three months of 2023 compared with the same period in 2022 (AoR GBV).

Funding programmes dedicated to women and girls enable them to manage their specific needs, for example, during menstruation, pregnancy or breastfeeding, and help to reduce violence. This is the raison d'être of this cutting and sewing and sausage processing project. Each woman will be able to take care of the urgent needs for her own existence and that of her family. This project aims to open up a world where every woman counts, with her full potential realised. The experience of training vulnerable women in cutting and sewing and making sausages is helping to integrate a number of displaced and marginalised women in the city of Goma and the surrounding area. We must point out that the M23 war continues to traumatise women and put them on the road to displacement. They are living in very catastrophic situations. Other women in the town of Goma are suffering the negative effects of this crisis. Many of the city's women have been abandoned by their husbands and deserve very special attention. This is why GMT ASBL is continuing to step up its protection efforts on behalf of these women, so that they can be easily reintegrated into society after having abandoned their original environment.

At the end of this project, we hope to have more resilient women who have been able to withstand the shocks and traumas caused by decades of war and will be able to invest in their own development. Some of them will be able to recover their dignity, which had already been trampled underfoot by their families and communities.