The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has started to introduce a range of programs to provide basic health and education services for the Pygmies of the northern Sangha region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). UNICEF Congo is currently working with partners in the region and the Congo government to establish much-needed health centers and schools in indigenous Pygmy and Bantu communities.
A key part of the plan is the provision of agricultural tools, seeds and training to help create self-sustaining food production programs in Pygmy villages. Project planners hope to extend the benefits of these initiatives to 50,000 Pygmy families in the Likoula, Lekoumou, Bouenza, and Plateaux regions of the Congo.
The indigenous inhabitants of the forests of central Africa - such as the Efe, the Mbuti, the Twa and the Baka – are commonly known as ‘Pygmies’. Many Pygmy communities have traditionally had symbiotic relationships with their farming Bantu neighbors. Pygmies have developed intimate knowledge of the forests they inhabit as expert trackers and hunters, and can identify thousands of herbal medicines. Pygmies have traditionally exchanged forest products and labor for Bantu goods such as starches, iron, cloth and salt.
External forces have disrupted the Pygmies’ finely balanced relationships with both their neighbors and their environment. The complex civil war that still ravages the DRC (formerly Zaire) has had a major impact on groups such as the Efe, who have been pushed from homes in the Ituri Forest by the arrival of thousands of immigrants and refugees. These pressures are compounded by the large-scale commercial logging that has taken place in the area throughout the 1990s by European and Malaysian companies. Slash-and-burn farming, clear cutting, illegal poaching, and mineral extraction to fill war coffers have led to the increased incidence of malaria and other infectious diseases. The average life expectancy of an Efe adult is now 40 years.
With virtually no political voice in at the national level, Pygmies are the most marginalized group in the DRC, and in other neighboring countries. They experience discrimination in all sectors of society: many Bantu even object to Pygmy children attending schools with Bantu children. In their remote forest villages, often situated on the periphery of Bantu communities, basic health services and education is scarce.
With recent peace talks proposing the end of the civil war, there is a cautious renewal of hope for the region’s residents, including the Pygmies. Rwanda has pledged to remove 30,000 of its troops from the DRC in the next month, and to withdraw support for rebels. Should the peace envisioned in the agreement become reality in the near future, many obstacles to improving the basic living conditions in Pygmy communities will be removed. In the meantime, UNICEF Congo is working to ensure that many Pygmy communities are able to regain some measure of control over their own welfare and future.
UNICEF is currently seeking more donors for the Pygmy Project; more information is available at (www.unicef.org).
