Executive Director, Congolese American Council for Peace and Justice
2009: We are a network of individuals and organizations with different expertise in the field of Conflict Transformation and Development. We focus our work on outcomes and make sure that we have verifiable indicators to measure the changes that we want to see in people’s lives. Therefore, we use the BACKSA approach and teach it to our partners. BACKSA is defined as: Changes in Behavior, Attitudes, Conditions of people , their Knowledge before and after, Skills acquired and, Aspiration to evaluate our work.
We stay away from the ‘giving the fish’ and ‘teaching to fish’ approaches but focus on ‘teaching to fish and opening the market’. This is where peace, justice and development of Congo lie. That’s our raison d’être.
Prior to joining the Congolese American Council for Peace and Justice, I was the Dianne and Lillie Foundation’s Executive Director; worked at Church World Service as Associate Director in charge of International Emergency Response; worked as advocate at Refugees International; worked as Independent Consultant and worked with the Mennonite Central Committee in Zambia and Angola from 2001 to 2003.
In 2009 I wrote a French-language book The Culture of Peace: From Traditional African and Judeo-Christian Perspectives. I just finished writing The Congo: The Long Road to Peace and Justice in which I propose Africa-rooted restorative justice practices as the way to address deep-seated, real issues rather than their symptoms.