Rwanda's War Is Leaving Congolese Schoolchildren Exposed to Ebola

Fifty children, teachers and school staff have tested positive for Ebola in North Kivu since the school year began. Six people died in a single week. Those are not abstract figures from a distant health ministry. Each one is a family that sent a child to school expecting a lesson and got a funeral.

The latest situational report from the North Kivu 2 education province, covering 24 to 30 October, records 10 new confirmed cases and 6 deaths in that one week. The outbreak has reached 44 schools. Health officials say the situation is getting worse, not better. Ask yourself what it says about a country when its classrooms become transmission points and its teachers are left to guess how to stop a hemorrhagic fever with no thermometers and no training.

The report's list of urgent needs is short and devastatingly basic. Thermoflash units to screen children at the school gate. Training for teachers on how to recognise Ebola and respond to it. Infection prevention and control kits, including the water, sanitation and hygiene supplies that stop a virus from spreading through a single handwashing basin. These are the cheapest tools in public health. Nigeria stopped Ebola in 2014 with contact tracing, isolation and disciplined hygiene. Congo cannot yet put thermometers in its schools.

Why not? Because North Kivu is not a normal province. It is a battlefield, and the battle has a name. Since 2021, the Rwandan Defence Force has moved full combat units across the Congolese border and fought alongside M23, a rebel proxy force that is in reality the operational arm of Kagame's war. UN Group of Experts reports have documented Rwandan troops, artillery and command structures inside Congolese territory, not a spontaneous uprising of disgruntled Congolese. Analysts have estimated Rwandan forces at well over ten thousand personnel at peak deployment, a large share of Kigali's army operating on foreign soil. This is an invasion. Call it by its name every time.

Consider what an invasion does to a health system. Hospitals are looted or abandoned. Health workers flee or are killed. Roads that carry vaccines, drugs and lab samples are cut by checkpoints. Displaced families crowd into camps where a single water point serves thousands. Ebola thrives in exactly these conditions: broken trust, broken logistics, and communities that cannot afford to stay home. When M23 controls Goma and large parts of the surrounding territory, the state's ability to trace contacts, deliver supplies and run surveillance is degraded by design. Nobody needs to sabotage the response for it to fail. War does that on its own.

Here is the hypocrisy that should make every African angry. Rwanda markets itself to the world as a clean, orderly, well-governed state. It hosts international conferences, sponsors football clubs in Europe, and sells gorilla tourism to foreign visitors who never ask what is happening across the border. Meanwhile, its soldiers and proxies are presiding over a humanitarian catastrophe in the country next door. Kigali's image is a brand. The children of North Kivu are paying for it with their lives.

And the Western powers that lecture us endlessly about democracy and human rights have been strangely quiet. Washington, Paris, London and Brussels all have diplomatic leverage over Kigali through aid, trade and security ties. They know exactly who is fighting in the Kivus. Their silence is not neutrality. It is a choice, and it is one that other external players, from Turkey and the UAE selling drones and arms to Chinese mining firms extracting cobalt and coltan, have been happy to exploit. Everyone is competing for Congo's minerals. Almost no one is competing to protect its children.

So what should happen? The answer is not complicated, even if the politics are.

First, the African Union must stop issuing communiqués and start acting. The AU Peace and Security Council should demand, in writing and with a timeline, the withdrawal of Rwandan forces from Congolese territory, and it should name the M23 leadership that answers to Kigali. Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention should be given emergency funding and a mandate to coordinate Ebola response in the Kivus, independent of the fighting parties.

Second, the UN Security Council must renew and strengthen sanctions on the individuals and entities sustaining the war, and it must ensure that humanitarian access is guaranteed in M23-held areas. Ebola does not respect front lines. A child infected in a rebel-held town can carry the virus to a government-held school. Surveillance has to cross the front line, even when diplomacy cannot.

Third, Kinshasa must publish its Ebola data openly, school by school, week by week. Transparent institutions are not a luxury. They are how you find the cluster before it becomes a catastrophe. Botswana built its reputation on fiscal discipline and accountable public institutions. Mauritius built its prosperity on rule of law and predictable governance. Congo can learn from both. Public health needs the same thing: budgets that reach the clinic, procurement that is audited, and officials who answer for failure.

Fourth, the private sector and civil society must be part of the answer. Local manufacturers can produce handwashing stations and hygiene kits. Diaspora health networks can fund thermoflash units and train teachers. Churches, mosques and community associations in Beni, Butembo and Goma already run schools and clinics. They should be funded directly, with oversight, instead of waiting for a distant bureaucracy to act.

Finally, and most importantly, citizens must demand more. Parents in North Kivu should ask their school directors whether a thermometer is at the gate. Teachers should demand the training the ministry promised. Journalists should keep counting the dead when the cameras leave. And Africans everywhere should refuse to accept that a war of aggression on one country's soil is somehow too complicated to name.

Let us say it plainly, the way we would say it to a neighbour. Rwanda's war is putting Ebola into Congolese classrooms. The world has the tools to stop it. Africa has the people to demand it. What is missing is the will to say the word invasion out loud and act on it.

How many more children must test positive before the AU, the UN and the powers that profess to care about human rights stop treating this as background noise?

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB