DRC’s Pygmy refugees stranded in city, cut off from forest life

Since May 2026, families from the Indigenous Pygmy community have been living in extreme hardship in Boikene, a district of Beni in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). They fled violence blamed on the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an armed group active in the region. For these families, the displacement means more than losing their homes. They are now far from the forests that provide their food, medicine, and traditional way of life. In Boikene, they struggle to survive without access to their usual means of subsistence. The ADF has been a persistent source of instability in eastern DRC, forcing many communities to leave their land. For the Pygmy people, who have deep cultural and economic ties to the forest, the distance from their environment makes this crisis especially severe.