A healthier future rural households

Benjamin Rwizibuka, from our Companion Diocese of Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo, provides an update on an ambitious project and appeals for help

The main objective of Congo Nature+ (CN+) is to equip rural households to respond to current and future needs, such as reforestation and erosion management, natural resources management and management of the region's main food crops to improve yields and productivity. Our entire vision is to move our population from subsistence agriculture to moneymaking businesses.

Between 2018 and 2023, we focused our activities on strengthening and building the capacity of agricultural households in key crops including rice and cassava. During this period, we trained around 2,000 households in good farming practices, management of diseases and pests in main crops and the use, production and conservation of good quality seed.

In addition to the routine activities of working with agricultural households, in 2024 our main priority is the legalisation of our association. This will allow us to consider major and bigger projects for our population in the future.

From 2025, we would like to be a little more involved in development projects. We plan to launch the Rotating credit for small and large livestock project, to meet the need for meat on the market. The local supply of meat is minimal and rural households simply no longer have sufficient livestock: there is urgency and opportunity to address this. We would also like to launch the Seed for All project to enable the production of large quantities of good quality seeds that we could make available to households who have been harvesting seeds from the same crops for more than a decade - this being one of the causes for the drop in yields and poor product quality.

Regardless, CN+ still faces certain major limitations. These include unstable logistics; the need for members’ training in certain key areas; and dependence on our own financial resources, which are sometimes insufficient to match our ambitions.

We have, therefore, started looking for possible partners who can help us (a) increase the speed at which we work and (b) fulfill our current and future ambitions. So we are taking this opportunity to appeal to any person or organisation in the United Kingdom who would like to support us to contact us as soon as possible, via the Editor of Pobl Dewi. (editorpd@churchinwales.org.uk)