Enabling Affected Communities to Survive and Thrive (EAST) Consortium

EAST is a 28-month, £28 million GBP nutrition and livelihood programme funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) and managed by a consortium of five international and national humanitarian NGOs, led by Concern Worldwide. 

Collectively, the Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (Acted); Concern Worldwide (as the lead agency); Congo Handicap (CH); Danish Refugee Council (DRC); and Première Urgence Internationale (PUI) bring decades of experience in livelihoods, nutrition, protection, and inclusion programming in DR Congo, underpinned by robust monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning mechanisms. 

Over the course of the programme, the EAST Consortium will implement an integrated package of protection and nutrition activities in 11 health zones across 4 provinces in Eastern DR Congo, aiming to support over 430,000 individuals including 65,000 people living with disabilities across the four most conflict affected provinces of DR Congo: Ituri; North Kivu; South Kivu and Tanganyika.

The populations of the Eastern provinces of the DR Congo have been subjected to a decades-long humanitarian crisis. The DRC suffered from one of the worst-ever civil wars in on the African continent, one that shifted from national conflict in the late 1990s to localised violence. Since the start of 2025, violence in the east has drawn in the participation of multiple regional actors either in support of the DRC government, or the prominent rebel group M23. Fighting reached the major city of Goma, home to over 2 million people, forcing over 500,000 to flee and forcibly evicting up to a million people from displacement sites. 

1 out of 10 Congolese is directly impacted by the conflict, and 1 out of 20 is displaced. More than 60% of the population lives on less than $2.10 per day, illustrating a stark social divide in a country rich in natural resources. Despite considerable assets – mineral resources, hydroelectric potential, vast arable land, exceptional biodiversity, and the second largest tropical forest in the world – the majority of the inhabitants benefit very little from them. In 2024, the DRC ranked 180th out of 191 countries on the Human Development Index, highlighting the magnitude of the challenges to be addressed.

The DRC is also home to one of the world’s largest hunger crises. Nearly 18 million people require emergency food aid, with the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimating that nearly 25.5 million people are at a crisis level of hunger or higher. With heightened insecurity impeding physical access to key services, and a lack of functioning health facilities, the already acute nutritional crisis is worsening. 

The majority of territories within the four most affected provinces in the East of the country are facing catastrophic levels of protection risks linked to land, housing and property, with the most vulnerable often resorting to extreme coping strategies in order to survive. The escalation in conflict and displacement in early 2025 have increased exposure to protection risks and acts of violence. Women, girls, and vulnerable groups (such as children, older persons, and people with disabilities), are disproportionately affected by violations including forced recruitment, rape and other forms of sexual abuse.

Concern recognises that humanitarian actors cannot address these complex issues in isolation from each other. As part of a coordinated response, the EAST Consortium was established, with funding from the FCDO, to strengthen the resilience and protection of vulnerable populations living in conflict-affected areas in the east of DR Congo.

We will achieve these objectives by focusing on:

• Livelihood support to vulnerable households to facilitate recovery from shocks and improve their means of subsistence.
• Active management and prevention of malnutrition cases.
• Response to, prevention and mitigation of sexual and gender-based violence.

Working across 4 sectors to create a sustainable and resilient environment in which vulnerable households benefit, thereby reducing the suffering of men, women and children and supporting those affected by humanitarian crises, between December 2023 and December 2024, EAST reached:

• 21,000 people with livelihoods support
• 35,000 people with protection interventions
• 372,000 people with health and nutrition inteventions
• 5,700 people living with disabilities