From South Kivu to the World: Bukavu Youth Take Up the Question of Global Authority

Young World Federalists
Jul 17
4 min read

On Friday 26 June 2026, twenty-five young people gathered at the Centre Jeunes at the Panzi parish in Bukavu, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, with hand sanitiser at the door and a morning set aside for a single question: why the decisions that shape their city get made in places that have no route in for anyone who lives there.

The workshop was organised by the Congo-DRC Youth Community Network (RCJC-DRC) under the title Du Sud-Kivu au monde: donner une place aux voix locales dans les décisions mondiales, from South Kivu to the world, giving local voices a place in global decisions. Marcel Cikuru and Rodrigue Iragi led the session and Bienfait Mushagalusa facilitated. In the spirit of the YWF #UniteTheWorld campaign, the aim was to take a question usually asked in conference halls and spend two and a half hours on it in a parish hall instead. Young World Federalists funded the room, the transport, and the water.

Panzi has been at this for a while; the timeline of events is important. On 5 December 2025, RCJC-RDC and Humanity and Actions for Development mobilised families in this same neighbourhood to plant trees along the Ruzizi river for National Tree Day, under the theme of keeping the DRC a solution country. On 4 April 2026, around thirty volunteers spent a Saturday morning clearing waste from the Kamagema market for International Zero Waste Day, on thin funding and borrowed gloves, and roughly fifteen people joined the network after watching them do it. In June the team wrote the argument down on this site: after three decades of conflict, with armed groups operating across borders and illegal mining running through international networks, the question of an authority capable of enforcing the rule of law above nation-states deserves to be raised. Later that month they convened twenty-five people to work on it.

Four actions in seven months out of one neighbourhood, and the connection between them is an escalation: This is what subsidiarity looks like when it is lived rather than diagrammed. You start with the tree you can plant and the market you can clean. You keep going until you reach the thing you cannot fix from Panzi. Then you ask who can.

Participants on 26 June were drawn from across the city, from Kadutu and Panzi to Mulengeza, Nsuba, Meteo and Bukavu's first district, out of RCJC-DRC's own network of students, volunteers and community youth leaders. The morning opened with the objectives and a set of participatory sessions. The group then broke into a focus group and worked through what stops a place like Panzi from reaching the decisions that land on it, and what would have to change. Participants wrote down recommendations. Two of them recorded video testimonies at the end. Twelve young people committed to join the network as volunteers or active members, the report noted, at the close of the morning.

Like much grassroots work in the region, the day ran into real constraints, and the largest of them was not money. The country was six weeks into its seventeenth Ebola outbreak. Three confirmed cases had already reached South Kivu. The organisers bought hygiene supplies from a pharmacy across the road from the Panzi referral hospital, held the session to two and a half hours, and kept the room to people they could reach and account for. That is why twenty-five, and not sixty.

It is tempting to look at a workshop in a parish hall and treat it as a discussion group. That reading misses what was already in the room. The strain moving through eastern DRC this summer is Bundibugyo, first identified in Uganda in 2007. Nineteen years later there is still no licensed vaccine for it and no approved treatment, and it kills roughly one in three of the people it infects. Zaire ebolavirus, the strain most people picture when they hear the word Ebola, does have a licensed vaccine. It arrived in 2019, five years after that strain killed more than eleven thousand people in West Africa and turned up in Dallas and in Madrid. The difference between the two is not biology. It is which bodies decided what to fund, and who was standing in the room when they decided. Nobody from Panzi was in that room. Nobody from Panzi has ever been in that room.

This is where the case for world federalism lands in practical terms. There is a familiar answer to what the young people in Panzi were describing, which is that local voices should be heard. The Bukavu team explained why that answer is too weak, and they put it better than we would: the current system, they wrote, often limits itself to issuing recommendations. Being heard is a courtesy. Somebody with power invites you in, listens, thanks you, and then decides, and you have no recourse when they decide against you. Standing is different. Standing means the body that decides is answerable to you whether or not it wants to be, and the route in does not depend on anybody's goodwill. World federalists argue for a democratic, accountable global system with the authority and the resources to act rather than recommend. The young people of RCJC-DRC have spent seven months arriving at that argument from a riverbank, a market, and a parish hall. They deserve institutions that match it.

The network is not stopping here. RCJC-DRC is planning a series of community focus groups and capacity-building sessions through the rest of the year, built to hold momentum rather than mark dates on a calendar. The team is asking for sustained support rather than one-off funding, and for the kind of partnership that treats this as civic infrastructure rather than a series of events.

A world federation will not be granted from above. It will be grown from below, and Panzi proves it.

Young World Federalists exists to back exactly this kind of youth-led organising, from Bukavu to Lilongwe, Kaduna, Nairobi and beyond. For 2.50 USD a month or 10 USD a year, anyone can become a YWF member and help fund the next Friday morning at Panzi.