Rebuilding a Life in War-torn Congo

On November 1, 2006, Angeline Balungwe was a recipient of the ELI Congo micro-loan in Chihonga, D.R. Congo, a remote village in the South Kivu province in Eastern Congo. Angeline a 30 year-old widow. Her husband was killed in the war in 2002, and she has been farming the local cassava root, the staple food in this region, to feed her and her five children.

Because of the war, rebel activity has taken out livestock of any kind, leaving people no manure to put back vital nutrients into the soil. The result is an extremely low yield crop, producing tubers the size of ones thumb, leaving the families like Angeline’s with very little food. Ten roots from the local cassava produces one kilo of cassava flour, and one kilo will produce two loaves of cassava bread, enough to feed three people for one day.

Formerly: Ten roots = 1 kg flour = 2 loaves of bread
Now: One root = 1 kg flour = 2 loaves of bread

ELI has introduced a new Nigerian-hybrid cassava that produces roots that are one kilo each, with up to six of these roots per plant. It starts producing these in less than nine months - less than half the time of the local version.

Only eight months after planting, Angeline has now begun to harvest her first cassava roots. After pulling up her very first plant from the ground, she could hardly believe her eyes. With the roots from one plant, she exclaimed, she could feed her family twice a day and would have enough left over at the end of the day. And with this harvest, she will have up to 10 cassava seedlings to replant the next year, sell them in the community or give them away to friends and family.

The idea is spreading through out this 100-square-kilometer region of 11 villages, and people are on their way to rebuilding a life in this war-torn part of the nation.

Text and photo by Micah Albert