Violent conflict and its accompanying peace processes shape and transform political, economic and social dynamics, including gender relations. The international community has supported Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programmes, through which armed actors are supported to lay down their weapons and return to civilian life, for over 30 years. Yet they have a low success rate, especially for preventing a return to conflict and addressing gender inequalities. Armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have undergone four DDR processes supported by the United Nations and the World Bank. Since 2008, DDR programmes in the DRC have included a comprehensive gender strategy. Nevertheless, women ex-combatants have been continually excluded from these programmes, and in the cases where they were included, the support they have received was sub-par and left many of them to fend for themselves. In 2021, the DRC adopted a national strategy for the implementation of a fifth process, the Demobilization, Disarmament, Community Recovery and Stabilization (P-DDRCS) programme, which has a clear community reintegration component and gender strategy.

This report investigates the experiences of former female combatants during their time in an armed group as well as their experiences after demobilizing, whether through a formal DDR process or not. The aim of this report is to gain a deeper understanding of how gender can influence the realities of women ex-combatants as they demobilize and reintegrate, as well as to develop a more thorough understanding of how gender is perceived and understood within a Congolese context in order to offer recommendations for how to successfully implement a gender strategy in the P-DDRCS.

Through in-depth interviews with women ex-combatants and public authorities in Bukavu, South Kivu Province, between June-November 2023, this report found that the most common avenue for demobilization among women is self-demobilization. The reasons for this are: i) a general lack of awareness about DDR programmes; ii) the stigma attached to being a woman ex-combatant that going through a DDR programme would reveal, which was also cited by previous studies of reintegration of female ex-combatants (Transitional International 2019: 107); and iii) a negative perception of DDR programmes in general due to the failure of past programmes, which did not provide gender-sensitive education and economic opportunities.

Furthermore, we also found that there is a lack of educational and economic opportunities within DDR programmes that can provide new skills or take advantage of existing skills. This not only makes reintegration more difficult but often results in women finding alternative means of survival via prostitution or returning to an armed group. Finally, there is a clear gap between how key concepts such as gender are framed within the official DDR policies, and how those concepts are understood by target groups.