A fire swept through the Muganwa camp near Kalemie in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on 11 September, destroying several shelters. Women rushed to pull their children and belongings away from the blaze, while young men tore down neighbouring shelters to create a firebreak.
The camp, close to the lakeside town of Kalemie, the provincial capital of Tanganyika in eastern DRC, is home to thousands of displaced civilians. Their shelters are built from sticks and dried palm leaves. In the dry season, a spark from a charcoal cooking fire destroyed the homes of several families.
Escape from M23 advance
The people here fled heavy fighting between the Congolese army and the March 23 rebel group (M23), which is supported militarily by Rwanda. More than a year has passed since the DRC and Rwanda signed a US-mediated peace accord, but violence has continued, and M23 holds swathes of land across North and South Kivu provinces.
The impact of war is now felt in a third province, Tanganyika, which borders South Kivu. Furaha Kahisa, a mother of six, watched the fire die down. She travelled more than 250 miles (400km) on foot with her young children in early 2025. “I came from Minova on the South Kivu-North Kivu border, and fled as militias defeated by M23 looted my village,” she said. “We fled to Goma [capital of North Kivu], but knew the M23 would arrive shortly after the militias ran away, so we moved quickly and reached South Kivu.”
The family could hear fierce fighting behind them as M23 seized the provincial capitals of Goma and Bukavu. “What I witnessed at home made me fear we would never escape if we were attacked again,” said Kahisa. Instead of waiting for renewed attacks, she decided to take her family as far south as possible along Lake Tanganyika. To reach Muganwa camp, she spent nearly three more weeks on the road, relying on the kindness of strangers in roadside villages who gave her cassava to feed the children.
Dire conditions in camps
Kahisa settled in the camp even though conditions are dire: a single muddy stream is the sole source of water for drinking and washing for hundreds of people. Nearly 100,000 displaced civilians arrived in Tanganyika between November 2025 and February 2026 alone, during an M23 offensive against the lakeside town of Uvira in South Kivu. The town was recaptured by government forces in January, but fighting has continued in the nearby mountains of Fizi.
Many civilians and soldiers fled the fighting in Uvira by boat. “The wind was very strong,” said Jeanne Sikitu. “It took a week of sailing. We suffered … I could not even count how many of us were in that boat under the sun,” she said. “We had nothing to eat on the journey, because we fled our village with nothing when the gunfire approached.”
Those fleeing the M23 frontline to arrive in Tanganyika find themselves in a place that has itself experienced years of insecurity. The province is now home to an estimated more than 330,000 displaced civilians, including the new arrivals, staying in several camps including Muganwa and Mulicha. Many are victims of ethnic clashes. A local grouping of militias, the Biloze Bishambuke, has attacked other ethnic groups, pillaged communities and stolen cattle in the nearby hills for more than a decade, and in Tanganyika’s forests a conflict has simmered between the Twa and Luba communities since it resumed in 2016.
Shared struggle and resilience
Josephine Salima lives in a shelter in Muganwa camp, just a short walk across the sand from Kahisa’s family. Unlike Kahisa, she was born in Tanganyika province and has lived at the camp since fleeing raids by the Biloze Bishambuke on her village, Matete, in late 2025. “They beat my pregnant daughter,” she explained. “We had no choice but to flee.” In many of the displacement sites dotted across the province, survivors of these conflicts can now be found cohabiting, sharing resources and awaiting aid.
Rose Mukalay, a 55-year-old farmer, fled from South Kivu in February 2025. “Two thousand, three hundred of us arrived here by boat,” she said. “The local village chief gave us this space, where we met others who already fled the Twa war.” She was recently elected president of the Mulicha displacement site, which means she must seek out the administrators of the territory to negotiate access to local schools for displaced children, and oversee attempts to raise whatever income she can for the two communities sheltering there.
“We cannot help ourselves if we have nothing,” said Mukalay. “So we are sharing the work of harvesting palm oil for the farmers here, and planting our own fields.” In the past five decades, Mukalay has seen generations of conflict along the lake. She remembers when another Rwanda-backed group, the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), attacked her region in the late 1990s, during the height of the second Congo war. “Even when the RCD were advancing, we could endure,” she said. But her fear during that conflict, which killed more people than any since the end of the second world war, doesn’t compare to what she is going through now. “With the M23 arriving, everything has worsened,” she said. “We would rather go hungry than hear gunshots each night.”
