Movement DR Congo

1. Why do you work with Umuntu and what is your personal motivation?

I hope that joining the Umuntu movement will help us to mobilise more. We want to expand our stakeholders, funds, agencies and we hope to get more important technical information for our projects.

I hope that the Umuntu community will help us to raise funds and support the following. Our region and vulnerable communities that are victims of climate change, wars and other conflicts.

2. What are the goals you want to achieve with Umuntu?
building community resilience and adapting vulnerable communities in the Kivu Lake Basin in eastern DR Congo to climate change.
This is the project that we want to implement in our region and will implement in the coming years. We want to divide the whole project into three parts.

1. “Lake Kivu Basin Planting Tree Project” with the goal of planting 1 million trees by 2020 (agroforestry = fruit trees, fertilizers and
   Antierosive trees). This should help communities to produce food and contribute to soil protection and landscaping.
2. “Green Education Project” with the aim to help schools and educational institutions. We would like to help institutions to establish garden nurseries, chicken, rabbit and fish farming, as well as agricultural and tree nurseries at their schools. In total, this project would involve at least 100 schools. The goal is to produce at least 2 million seedlings by the end of 2020 in order to plant trees.
3. The Umuntu Water Project concerns the provision of water in 2 villages in the Kalehe area and the installation of a small sewage treatment plant at Lake Kivu for water bottling and distribution in the city of Goma. We are thinking about making this a hybrid project (social business and humanitarian).

3. In which country and which region do we help you?

Our projects can be found in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

4. Who are you and what is your background?

First of all, my full name is LEON SIMWERAYI, from the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am a human rights activist, social business maker and environmentalist. As an activist I am now very passionate and committed to climate protection measures. I have been a founder and managing member of a voluntary youth entrepreneurship group (Association de Jeunes Visionnaires, www.ajvdc.org) since 2011. In 2016, I focused more deeply on the development of Congo. In the course of this I founded another voluntary environmental protection group called GREEN BRIGADE with the aim of protecting the environment, forest, water and the entire ecosystem of our region.