Elder Voices, Greener Choices: Mobilizing Oral Histories for Environmental Awareness in Kinshasa

Summary

This project mobilizes oral history interviews with elders to raise public awareness about urban flooding in Kinshasa. As extreme weather events intensify, it is increasingly important to safeguard historical environmental knowledge. In centralizing the voices and experiences of elderly people, the project takes the SDG principle “;leave no one behind” as one of its driving forces. Nine students from UNIKIN, UPN and ISP Gombe will be trained in oral and environmental history methods and will collect interviews from their grandparents/neighborhood elders about Kinshasa’s environmental history. These interviews will support historical analysis and a public outreach documentary, offering crucial lessons for today’s urban challenges. Strengthening the new Kinshasa-based initiative Centre d’Histoire Orale Kinshasa (CHOKIN), the project contributes to the revival of Congolese history departments while promoting urgent, community-driven solutions to environmental risks such as flooding.

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