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Internally displaced people from areas of conflict between the DRC’s government and M23, a rebel group with alleged links to Rwanda, have been fleeing to Goma for years, finding shelter in the city’s overrun refugee camps. Children from the camps often end up on the streets of Goma.
Boxing is fast catching up in the trouble-torn Goma in DRC, helping at least some children to come out of the streets to sport an aim in life. Reports indicate that adolescents in the country have joined a boxing club that helps street children, founded by Gaël Assumani, which is named as Nyama Boxing Club. It was established in 2020.
Those children aspiring to become boxing champions are mainly from two categories; homeless children who took to the streets because of poverty from the Goma region and two, children who had come from other regions because of the prevailing impoverishment in the Central African country.
Assumani, the mover and shaker of the project, had won the Democratic Republic of Congo’s lightweight champion title in 2020 and 2021. The sport offered him a way off the streets and now he wants to help other vulnerable children. Like many families in Goma, his family fled eastern Congo’s Ituri conflict in the 1990s, later spending five months in a refugee camp. He experienced homelessness as a teenager after his mother died in childbirth.
Internally displaced people from areas of conflict between the DRC’s government and M23, a rebel group with alleged links to Rwanda, have been fleeing to Goma for years, finding shelter in the city’s overrun refugee camps. Children from the camps often end up on the streets of Goma.
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Assumani says that more than a hundred children have been trained at his boxing club. The conflict has raged in the eastern DRC for decades, with the Congolese government fighting dozens of armed groups.M23 rebels have been seizing swathes of territory since 2022. Gaël Assumani aims to keep street children away from armed groups that operate in the area.
