Crisis Analysis Team – DR Congo: Monthly Displacement Report, December 2023 – Democratic Republic of the Congo

Humanitarian access

The second aspect of the report is the analysis of humanitarian access. CAT-DRC categorizes incidents based on a humanitarian access score. This score has six levels, from 1 to 6, which describe the severity of the impact of security incidents on humanitarian access. Level 1 corresponds to a situation where the incident has no impact on access. Level 6, the highest, corresponds to a situation where the incident causes extreme access constraints. Incidents at levels 4 to 6 have a severe impact on humanitarian access, and generally involve ambushes, clashes between armed actors, attacks and looting of villages, as well as natural disasters. The humanitarian access score thus makes it possible to identify the main hotspots in eastern DRC. For a given month, an analysis of access scores makes it possible to identify the actors who have caused the greatest humanitarian access constraints. From one month to the other, this score also enables us to understand the evolution of humanitarian access constraints in the territories studied.

Given the large number of areas studied in eastern DRC, CAT has limited its analysis to areas with a high concentration of displaced people. The analysis of humanitarian access is therefore carried out first and foremost in displacement hotspot areas, those which, over the last four months (including the month covered by this report), have recorded the highest number of displaced people whose humanitarian needs have not yet been met. These areas with a high concentration of displaced people are typically those which should be targeted for humanitarian intervention in the short term. As such, documenting access constraints to these areas seems clearly relevant. Concretely, in this report, the territories concerned by the humanitarian access analysis are those where the number of displaced/returned persons exceeds the median value (7 240 households) of the displacements recorded in all territories over the last four months (see Appendix 1 in the PDF).