With Médecins Sans Frontières: aid for displaced persons in North Kivu

What's happening in Goma is both recurrent and tragic. In this provincial capital of North Kivu in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the population is caught between the M23 (“March 23 Movement”) rebels and government forces. Over the past three years, between territorial conquests and movements of armed groups, between 600,000 and one million people have been displaced. In this never-ending humanitarian crisis, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) continues to operate health care centers and maintain its presence in camps for the displaced.

Since the beginning of 2024, fighting has intensified and the front lines are closing in on Goma and the camps, which are encircled by conflict zones on one side and Lake Kivu on the other. Access to drinking water is difficult, and MSF has called on the expertise of the Veolia Foundation to support it in a number of water access issues.

At the end of July, two Aquaforces 2000 mobile water purification units were sent into the field to supply water to the three hospital structures managed by MSF France. Nathalie Peraro, methods and performance engineer at Veolia in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, and Jocelyn Fillion-Nicollet, delegated works coordinator at Veolia Eau Ile-de-France, were mobilized for a two-week mission in the field. Their mission? Identify production and distribution sites, then train MSF personnel to deploy the two Aquaforces 2000, each capable of covering the water needs of 2,000 people. The challenge is to ensure that drinking water production continues after their departure.

There's the emergency of overflowing hospitals close to the front lines. There are the displaced persons camps set up to shelter the hundreds of thousands of people who have been fleeing the fighting for many months. North-west of Goma, the Rusayo camp is home to a growing number of families, trying to meet their basic needs. Access to water is a daily concern, and the Veolia foundation is also active in these camps. In the spring, two Veoliaforce experts were assigned to work on the water supply network in the Rusayo camp. Daniel Goujet, studies and projects manager based in Villefranche-sur-Saône, and Diane Vuillaume, studies and projects engineer also based in the east of France, were both called in, the first in the field, the second remotely.

Access to drinking water in a hospital or in a camp is the same problem, but the expertise required is different. For Daniel Goujet and Diane Vuillaume, the objective was to establish a hydraulic model of the existing and planned infrastructures. Daniel Goujet's presence in the field enabled him to collect the missing data and ensure that the future infrastructures would fit in with the operational strategy of the future infrastructure operator. Remotely, Diane Vuillaume worked for around twenty days on the sizing and planning of future infrastructures, to enable the quantities and costings to be fine-tuned prior to the launch of the works.

The collaboration between the Veolia Foundation and MSF, formalized by a partnership agreement inaugurated twelve years ago, has been fruitful: innovation in sanitation in Haiti, water quality in hospitals in tropical zones, emergency interventions in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kenya. Our shared objective is to bring together expertise and commitment.