Eric Joyce MP, Chair

WELCOME to the website of The UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region of Africa. This is a political website, but not party political: we are all passionate about the development of a region so vital to the future of Africa. The point of politics isn’t to get elected for its own sake – it’s to drive and influence change for the better. Most people agree that the government is doing a pretty good job on development, but people across the spectrum feel equally strongly about the desperate need for progress in the Great Lakes region. There’s a lot all of us can do to keep pressing for more resources and more development assistance - something that starts with raising awareness of the region as widely as possible in the UK. We try to do that by producing our own reports on the region, by convening working groups like the one below on corporate responsibility, by flagging up latest developments and reports, by lobbying ministers to help effect change.

The Great Lakes Region is the heart of Africa and potentially its driving force. But it has been wracked by years of conflict. In 1994, the Rwandan genocide shocked the international community, which did little effective to stop it. Since then, the region has seen wars ranging from the long-running conflict in Burundi to the devastating rebellion of the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. More than 4 million people have died as a result of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: the most devastating war since the Second World War, and one that few people in the rest of the world know of. Now, after 12 years of remarkable reconstruction in Rwanda, after elections in Burundi and Uganda, and with elections pending in the DRC, there is hope across the region for a brighter future.

On this site you will find information and debates about the big issues facing the region, contributions from great writers, and links to NGOs and others involved in Burundi, the DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda. Once you’ve had a chance to look us over, check the list of MPs signed up – if yours hasn’t done so yet, write and ask them to here.