When families flee at speed, and then flee again from the place they fled to, children get lost. That is the plain mechanism behind the numbers our protection teams are reporting from eastern DRC this quarter.
Each registered case is a slow piece of casework: documenting the child, tracing relatives across sites that may themselves have moved, verifying the relationship, and assessing whether reunification is genuinely in the child's best interests.
7.3M
people displaced in the east of the country
Reunification is not paperwork. It is finding one specific aunt, in one specific site, among hundreds of thousands of people who have all moved twice.
Our teams are running family tracing and reunification alongside child-friendly spaces and interim care placements, and treating severe acute malnutrition in the same sites. The three needs arrive together and cannot sensibly be funded apart.
We are calling on all parties to the conflict to respect international humanitarian law, to allow safe humanitarian access, and to keep displacement sites and the schools and clinics within them off the target list.
This article is sample content written for a portfolio front-end build. The quotes are composites and the figures are illustrative — nothing here should be cited as reporting.
