GOWERN, research laboratory of REGENERATION MATRIX group announces the creation of a document of analyzes and solutions to deal with the climate changes that the city of Uvira has been undergoing in recent years.
Indeed, tens of thousands of people have already lost their homes in 4 years due to the gradual disappearance of entire neighborhoods of the City of Uvira. These families lose their homes, their current and valuable objects and this in international indifference. They are invisible and among the first of a climatic catastrophe that began almost a decade ago.
GOWERN has been working on the subject for several years and is present in Uvira through its ANGELS network made up of members of civil society coordinated from Switzerland. In January 2022, it was estimated by the CRH-UVIRA (Hydrobiology Research Center
of Uvira) that 15,000 new people will lose their homes again at the beginning of 2023.
We are in January 2023 and the disaster started on January 15, then on January 22. With each new intense rain someone, a family loses their home, a church, a school can disappear. During the year 2022, we sought help from major humanitarian actors, but the funds to carry out preventive relocation of populations in the face of climate disasters do not exist.
If you’ve ever had a fire or flood in your life, you know there’s not much to save and you’ll just have to be alive. This is why we are launching a call for philanthropic partners or in the context of CSR to create with us an international preventive climate emergency fund which will be useful to the Cities on the Sub-Saharan Great Lakes but also to all the cities by the sea by example.
For 10 days we have undertaken with the CRH-UVIRA and our ANGELS network at UVIRA to make an inventory and to put solutions in the face of this inventory.
GOWERN has set up a LABELS project (voluntary empowerment of local actors, individuals, collectives, companies, etc.) which are direct operational solutions resulting from our strategies for the next 100 years.
Our philosophy is to empower local populations so that they can manage on their own in order to build their future in a sustainable way. In this context, we train or seek the resources of collaborators in the regions and territories in our beneficiary communities.
We are also looking for partner cities in the West who wish to participate in our actions within the framework of Twinning and who identify with our beneficiary Cities such as Cities of the Great Lakes for example for UVIRA. This is in order to share good practices and mutual support in the climatic events to come.
Today we are launching an appeal to help new victims in the emergency, but also those of previous years to build a better future elsewhere. Here land to rebuild neighborhoods further, we find them. People motivated to move and help others, there are. What is sorely lacking are the aid funds allocated to the region.
Without money, a family that has lost everything cannot eat. Often, she no longer has a roof over her head and she ends up making herself a tent, a shelter of odds and ends for several years. So moving a family with its furniture, its beds, its kitchen, its memories, all its living members, is completely different.
REGENERATION MATRIX group continues its path with these invisible and forgotten by all.
Thank you to those who wish to support the City of Uvira, support our actions to contact us on regenerationmatrix@gmail.com.
Done in Geneva, on 26.01.2023
Virginie Guignard-Legros
President of REGENERATION MATRIX group
Head of the GOWERN Research Laboratory
