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After almost a year of road rehabilitation work carried out by emergency relief and recovery organisation Medair, the remote village of Limangi, in conflict-affected North Kivu province, will be accessible by road for the first time ever on April 20, 2016. Until now Limangi has only been accessible by a jungle path. It takes an hour and a half of walking from the nearest town to reach the village.
“The new road will save lives by making it easier to deliver essential medicines and other emergency humanitarian aid to reach the remote village following a crisis, and enabling very sick patients to reach the hospital in time. It will also increase economic opportunities in the area,” says Joanna Coffin, Country Director.
In May 2015, Medair was the first organisation to reach the village following 13 years of occupation by an armed rebel group. The village’s isolation made life very challenging: the health clinic lacked medicines, sick people requiring urgent care had to be carried an hour and a half to the nearest hospital, and few goods were available in the market.
Medair rehabilitated the road using cash-for-work programming, offering local people a much-needed income in exchange for their work widening and improving the hiking trail to make it accessible to vehicles.
Medair has been working in Limangi and three even more remote clinics for a year, providing free health care to vulnerable people and support for health clinic staff. Until now, the difficult access meant that everything needed for the clinics – medicines, furniture, even a solar fridge – had to be carried on foot through the jungle.
This project is supported by the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department (ECHO) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).
For more information about Medair’s D.R. Congo programme, please click here.
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For Media
Please contact:
In DR Congo: Lucy Bamforth, Communications Officer (English, French) comms-cod@medair.org +243 (0)9 98 60 48 06 | +243 (0)8 13 43 23 80
At headquarters in Switzerland: Nathalie Fauveau, Press Relations (French, English, German) nathalie.fauveau@medair.org,+41 (0)21 694 84 72 or +41 (0)78 635 30 95
