At a meeting with RainShine in 2017 in the Epi village, the local people expressed the need for communication. The Epi village is located at Latitude 4.0137400 and Longitude 26.6762300. This location is a very remote part of DRCongo and it has no access to telecommunications. The absence of communication presents a number of problems, not only for RainShine to contact the village, but also in the case where there is an emergency such as an attack by a rebel group.
Rebel groups travel through this area, and when a village does not have any form of communication this can increase the risk of an attack. History shows that when remote communities have radio communication, this can limit the scale of an attack and also act as a deterrent to rebels because they know an attack can be reported quickly to authorities. A village that has sustained an attack can fore warn other villages that rebels are in the local area, which will save lives in many cases.
In 2017 we started engaging with the Invisible Children (IC) organisation to look at installing a High Frequency radio in the Epi Village. IC project staff from Dungu DRCongo conducted a field visit to the Epi Village in 2018 where an agreement was formed with the people to install a system.
In December 2019 the RainShine Foundation and Invisible Children successfully completed the installation of a High Frequency radio in the Epi village. The High Frequency radio will provide much needed communication, but it will also be included in the Early Warning Communication Network in Democratic Republic of Congo called LRA Crisis Tracker. The Epi High Frequency radio will be the first in this region of DRCongo and will be a strategic site in the network.
The Epi village can now share life-saving information with other villages, with the LRA Crisis Tracker team, and also with RainShine.
The LRA tracker system not only provides information to the world on all rebel acts in DRCongo, it also provides analysis to humanitarians, protection actors, and policymakers to ensure that they are able to more effectively protect communities like the Epi Village. Click here for LRA Tracker