How can Congolese doctors and nurses living in Belgium exchange information with colleagues in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)?
This was the central question at a roundtable convened by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Belgium’s capital, Brussels, recently. Belgian Minister for Overseas Development Service Armand De Decker; the health minister for the DRC, Zacharie Kashongwe, and four Congolese medical experts who currently live in Belgium participated in the debate, held Oct. 18. After years of war, the health care sector in the DRC is in tatters: 245 of every 1,000 children born in the Central African country do not live to the age of five, while life expectancy is less than 43 years. The priority of the health minister has been the reconstruction of hospitals in war torn areas. But, battling diseases such as cholera, malaria, tuberculosis and measles is just as urgent a matter. The DRC’s problems are too great for the expertise of the Congolese diaspora to be ignored in addressing them, said De Decker; he reaffirmed his commitment to funding exchange programmes, while the IOM said it wou
