Democratic Republic of the Congo
www.maishaplusgroupdrc.webnode.com
by Bailey, Nick, Lily, Will, Zoe
Maisha Plus Group!!!
They need your help!
DRC
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Executive Summary
By: Bailey, Lily, Nick, Will, & Zoe
Imagine living in one of the poorest countries in the world. You live in a mud-brick house, you live on hardly any food each day, you have no electricity, and you make about $171-$340 each year. You can’t afford clean water, healthy food, a decent education, vaccines for chronic, fast spreading, and life threatening diseases or medicine to help prevent it. This makes The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) a country with very poor health. That’s sadly what its like is there, but the Maisha Plus Group can help. The Maisha Plus Group is a group of 14 people including Albert, who is the leader of the group. The group owns an 11 year old drug store in the DRC. The group hopes to buy more medicine to help the people who live there; we picked this group because we wanted someone who helped the community be healthier.
When Belgium ruled the DRC they took most profits from the natural resources. In 1959, riots broke out in Leopoldville. Shops and houses were looted and burned. People died in the police response, and the DRC went bankrupt.
In 2005, people tried to help the DRC be healthier and cleaner, by cleaning up the water, because only 14% of the water is clean and only 16% of the people get this filtered water. This means that there is an increasingly high number of people getting sick. But unfortunately after they tried to clean the water the bacteria and germs came back. Some of these deadly diseases that kill many each year are Malaria, Tuberculosis, AIDS, and food poisoning. If Albert had money to buy medicine to help the people with the disease he could save lives. Since 1998 5.4 million people have mainly died from diseases and starvation. Thousands of people in 1997 were affected by AIDS and needed help, sadly so many people died because there weren’t enough people to help. Many people weren’t educated because barely any people go to college of the population goes to college, so there are only 59 pharmacists, and only 6,174 doctors who are actually educated.
In the DRC only 51% of the kids go to elementary school. Including the struggle for electricity in some towns, children are unable to do their school work at home. Only 3% of the DRC goes to college!! That means that almost all kids drop out at high school. Their literacy percent is only 66% which is not a lot. Education in the DRC is a huge worry. Our entrepreneur Albert is trying to get medicine and help kids by making them healthy, so they can go to school.
The population in the DRC is about 71,712,867. The growth rate is 3.2% so that means more kids can become educated, which means more jobs, which can lead to more money, which leads to those people helping their families live a better and healthier life. Also, the death rate has decreased to 11.06 deaths in a thousand births. Another thing is kids between the ages of 0 and 14 take almost HALF the population with 46.9 percent. People between the ages of 15 and 64 take up 50.6 percent and people over 65 take up 2.6 percent. This means that people do not live that long in the DRC. Also it means that there are way more kids than parents so that means if a mom or dad of a family dies there’s one parent to take care of probably a lot of kids.
The DRC is right near the equator; it is so hot and dry that many people there get dehydrated. People there rely on buying food or growing crops to sell, such as cassava, yams, plantains, rice, maize, manioc, tubers, sorghum, sugar cane, peanuts, sweet potatoes and pineapples.
The DRC is one of the world’s biggest producers of cobalt ore, and is a major producer of copper and diamond. You would think because of that, even the average person would be completely rich! WRONG! The only people making the money off of the resources are the owners, so the regular people of the DRC are making literally “dollars a day”.
Even though the DRC has plentiful resources and a tropical climate, the people in the DRC are in danger. Thousands of people die each year of diseases and sickness; that’s why Albert needs money to make the country healthier. If The Maisha Plus Group had money they could have medicine to help the people follow their dreams, to help their country too!
Even though the country is poor, a little bit of money such as twenty-five dollars could actually go a long ways and maybe even help many people!
