In the DRC, life is really tough, and if you're at the bottom of the social pecking order as a young woman it's the hardest place to be. Adolescent girls are married off at very young age and expected to start having and raising children immediately when they are scarcely an adult themselves. This means they lack much of an education and the resources to get a decent job or raise an income to support their family. Furthermore access to decent health care means that they are compromised when they are most vulnerable during their pregnancy and in post-natal care as well. 

Lack of literacy and access to education both cause and exacerbate women’s poverty and maintain gender-based barriers, and these barriers are far worse in rural than in urban areas. In rural areas of the DRC, a number of barriers to gender equality exist and have been well documented: domestic tasks that fall primarily on girls, early marriage and age of first pregnancy, unsafe and overcrowded schools, as well as poor and ill-suited learning content. According to UNESCO (2016), significant gaps exist in basic literacy: for those aged 15 years and older, female literacy is 66.5% compared to male literacy of 88.52%. According to the MICS survey for 2017-2018, the literacy gap between rural and urban women in the DRC is even more astounding: while 81% of urban women are literate, only 40% of rural women in the DRC are considered so, many never having attended any formal education.

Over the last 15 years, Susila Dharma International has worked hard in the DRC alongside an excellent local SD team initially establishing several community health centres with a particular focus on women, but also serving the wider communities where they are based in Kwilu Ngongo, Nkandu, Kingantoko and Lemba Imbu. Susila Dharma Britain matched substantial funds raised from external sources including the German government (via SD Germany) and generous investment from private donors including the Buchan Foundation and the Blond Family Trust.  

It soon became clear that health was only part of the picture, and that something needed to be done about improving the women's education to unlock other opportunities for the Congolese women. SD Britain stepped in to provide match funding this time from the Canadian government coordinated by SD Canada and supported by the same private donors. The project became known as the Community Learning Centres (CLC's), and they have been established adjacent to the Health Centres as well as in Kinshasa, the capital. 

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In 2022, SD Britain was pleased to be able to contribute towards the construction costs of the most recent CLC in Kinshasa, which followed on from two already completed CLC's at Kingantoko and at Nkandu. These buildings sit alongside the Community Health Centres, which allow the women and girls who will soon be learning there to also take advantage of the health care services for them and their children. Indeed, this project has emerged from their needs and requests for support. The project addresses the lack of services, programming and support to poor and rural women in the DRC to understand their rights and develop their human potential.

In spite of the relative advantage of life in the city, the CLC in Kinshasa has demonstrated that even in the capital city there is a significant need for training support, and now the centre is starting to attract young men as well as the women, who recognise the value provided in the types of training offered in a range of skills to better resource these young people to have a small enterprise in which they can develop and excel. Typically Congolese scratch a living out of almost nothing and are very resourceful, but these new skills are helping to set the young people up with a chance at a better life.

The CLC's project is innovative in multiple ways:  While it is comparatively easy to reach women and girls in larger urban areas of the DRC, this project provides learning and health services to women and girls who are hardest to reach and most under-served - those in the rural and semi-rural periphery where poor roads, limited access to running water and electricity make service provision more difficult. It is also an innovation to provide centres where women/girls can access multiple services at once: reproductive health, education, skills training and business support and where local authorities can play a meaningful role while themselves being sensitised and trained on gender equality principles and practices at the local level.

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The Learning/Health Centres operate as one-stop community-based service hubs, with the Health Centres providing health and reproductive health services, and the Learning Centres helping to address gaps in access to education, training and financial services, based on local and regional market realities, skill sets and opportunities. They do this by providing personalised skills training and entrepreneurship support to women and girls through on-line and in person training, providing support with literacy and basic education, training in agriculture and livestock management, beekeeping and honey production, food production and processing, animal husbandry, soap-making, sewing, aesthetics and a range of other skills. They also offer access to mentoring and support to enable them to start their own businesses, including access to a microfinance fund supported by existing women’s savings groups. This project challenges the types of skills that are traditionally thought of as being 'women's work', offering new opportunities to develop viable self-employment and income generation that are linked to real market opportunities.