Kufatilia, (“to track” in Swahili) is a community-based incident reporting and monitoring system active across four provinces in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Ituri, North Kivu, South Kivu and Lualaba).

To allow civil society, local authorities and other stakeholders to visualise confirmed incidents reported through the Kufatilia incident reporting system, IPIS has developed a public interactive dashboard. 

All incidents recorded on the platform are linked to the exploitation, transport, or trade of minerals. They are classified by the members of the Kufatilia Network into a main category (e.g., accident, violence, environmental issue) and a subcategory (e.g., landslide, armed attack, use of toxic products such as mercury).

When fact-checking and following up on an incident, members are asked to geolocate it. They specify the province, the territoire, the secteur or chefferie, the groupement and the mine or village where it occurred. However, because some of the involved boundaries are not clearly delineated, and small villages or mines are not registered in any datasets, only the province and territoire are used for visualisation on the dashboard. Finally, the incident status indicates if an incident is being monitored, if it has been addressed and resolved or if the issue is persistent. Users can filter and visualise incidents on the dashboard using these indicators.

A subset of this data is available for download. However, we advise caution in the use of Kufatilia incident data for statistical purposes. Even if the dataset contains many incidents, it remains selective and is provided without any claim about the coverage of all incidents in a given location, period, or category. The absence of data does not necessarily mean that no incidents have occurred; it may simply be the result of limitations in the reporting chain. Although the members of the Kufatilia Network verify incident details, we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information provided. Therefore, extreme caution should be exercised when establishing trends or drawing conclusions based on this dataset.

The dashboard is intended to enable informational and non-commercial use of the incident data. Neither IPIS, nor any of its partners can be held liable for any decision made or action taken based on the information contained in this dashboard, nor for any consequential damage.

MORE ABOUT KUFATILIA

Kufatilia – Reporting and monitoring of mining-related incidents in eastern and southern DRC

In operation since 2018, Kufatilia (“to follow-up” in Swahili) is an incident reporting and monitoring system launched by IPIS and Congolese civil society partners. Active across four provinces in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), it aims to give mining-affected communities the tools to report critical issues such as mine accidents, interference of armed groups, forced or child labour, roadblocks, violence, illegal taxation, theft, or fraud.

Kufatilia has been supported by multiple donors over the years, including the Belgian development cooperation, the European Union, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the European Partnership for Responsible Minerals (EPRM), and USAID.