In 2021, as violence intensified in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda Youth Music’s team felt compelled to act. They trained a group of young Congolese community leaders to use music with children and young people living through conflict. The work quickly grew. By 2023, Kivu Youth Music’s team was delivering workshops to more than 3,500 children and young people in internally displaced people (IDP) camps and orphanages across North Kivu.

Today, in Goma, amid ongoing violence and mass displacement, Kivu Youth Music continues to create spaces where children can reconnect with themselves, with one another, and with hope.

Music in Times of Conflict

Conflict leaves lasting emotional and psychological scars. Every week, Kivu Youth Music’s trained music leaders run 150 music workshops across fifteen orphanages in Goma. Together with children living through conflict, they sing, move and create.

In the simple act of making music together, trust slowly returns. Emotions find a safe way to be expressed. Recovery can begin. Children get to be children again. This is critical mental health and psychosocial support—not alongside the music, but through the music, deeply rooted in local culture and community.

“Many of these children carry heavy emotional burdens, and for the first time, they feel truly heard and understood”

— Love With Actions’ occupational therapist

Mission

Kivu Youth Music equips local music leaders to provide culturally grounded psychosocial support for children and young people affected by conflict, while preserving the musical traditions that connect communities to their identity and environment. Current priorities include:

• Mental Health & Psychosocial Support Through weekly music workshops, trained local music leaders create safe, structured spaces where children affected by conflict can express themselves, rebuild trust and strengthen emotional resilience. Music becomes a shared language for healing, connection and recovery.
• Building Local Leadership Kivu Youth Music invests in young Congolese community leaders, equipping them with the skills to facilitate music programmes and provide long-term psychosocial support within their own communities. By embedding leadership locally, the programme builds lasting resilience that extends beyond emergency response.
• Music of the Landscape For generations, Congolese musicians known as Loulanguistes have carried the relationship between people and land through song, preserving history, culture and ecological knowledge across generations. Since 2023, Musicians Without Borders and IUCN NL have worked alongside young Congolese community leaders and ethnomusicologist Thomas Lusenge to research, archive and reactivate this musical heritage. In 2026, a new collaboration with The Listening Planet will invite young people to collect, record and compose the sounds of their natural environment, documenting both what remains and what is changing.

Impact

People

Partners