DRC: C’est Prévu Emmy Lusila, a young activist fighting against the phenomenon of street children

At only 20 years old, C’est Prévu Emmy Lusila is an activist for children’s rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). She is the founder of “La Voix de l’Espoir”, an organisation that fights against the phenomenon of street children and juvenile delinquency.

Emmy Lusila is only 20 years old, but she is already the “mother” of a dozen children. At the orphanage “Maison des Anges” that she opened in 2017, the young Congolese woman takes care of 13 children she has taken off the street.

Emmy is a law student. She began to get involved with street children called “shégués” in the DRC at the age of 13. It was during visits to the sick in hospitals by her church that she began to take an interest in street children in Kinshasa. She became passionate about these children, whom she saw while going to school and who spent their time on the street and living in inhumane conditions. Very early on, she became involved with them and once even convinced her mother to take a street child in their home.

At the age of 15, she created with her friends the association “La Voix de l’Espoir” which counts 55 young people and which helps these children. In 2017, she opened the orphanage “La maison des anges”, which welcomes the children she took off the street. “I think that we cannot build a very strong society with so many children on the streets because on the streets there is no supervision, there is no education,” she tells AJ+ French.

Every day, she goes out on the streets and targets the corners where the street children are, makes contact with them, gets their trust and tries to either integrate them into families or to insert them into the orphanage. The orphanage currently welcomes children from 2 to 12 years old. For those who are older, they are taken in by partner orphanages.

To ensure the well-being of these children, each member of the association gives his or her time to visit the children in the orphanage three times a week, to talk to them individually and to accompany them, among other things, to do their homework…

The association finances the orphanage on its own through weekly contributions of 1000 FCFA from each member, supplies the orphanage and takes the children to the hospital when they are sick.

With approximately 20,000 children on the streets, 46% of them girls and 54% boys, the DRC is one of the countries most affected by this phenomenon, which is due to several factors, including divorce, remarriage, etc. In addition, juvenile delinquency affects most street children, who often end up in gangs or “kulumas”. Today, the young activist’s ambition is to get more children off the streets and to create several orphanages in each municipality or province of the country.