Marie-Rose Tshite is a young female peacebuilder from the Democratic Republic of Congo whose leadership and research champions in building the capacity of women in politics. She studied International Relations and Diplomacy at the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria majoring in international politics and African states political evolution. She is pursuing a Master Degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality studies with a focus on Congolese Women involved in peacebuilding from 1997 to 2003. She has previously counseled war zone refugees as a volunteer for the UNISA’s Bright Site Project and has also interned with the United Nations Information Center in Pretoria, where she co-coordinated the 2014 Mandela Day and its educational outreach programs. She is the current coordinator of the YALI-RDC and has organized several activities to advance the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2250 to increase youth representation at the regional and national levels in the DRC.
Marie-Rose at a National Democratic Institute event in Liberia, 2020.
She is passionate about enhancing the capacities of young women in peacebuilding and creating partnerships between young people and political leaders in Congo. Her work spans multiple countries, South Africa, Liberia (Mano River region), and the DRC. One of the key initiatives she is involved with is the Network of Emerging Women Politics (NEW Politics), a program operating in four Western African countries along the Mano River Region, which trains young women with the skills and mentorship needed to participate in politics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she was also actively involved in a grassroots campaign against the kidnapping of women in Kinshasa, the capital of Democratic Republic of Congo. Her work has required her to collaborate and have dialogues with high-level government officials and leaders in the DRC, making her a powerful youth advocate.
Marie-Rose’s journey as a peacebuilder began not for credentials or professional purposes, but due to a moving personal tragedy which brought her and her family face-to-face with violent conflict. The results of the 2006 elections in Kinshasa resulted in a violent contest, which involved shooting in Kinshasa in front of a local school. For the sixteen year old girl she was at the time, this meant that the life of her younger girls was in danger as she was a student at the school which had experienced the shooting. This is a pivotal moment in Marie-Rose’s life as it made her deeply reflect how violent conflict uproots local lives and livelihoods. She recalls how her hometown, Kinshasa, a bustling city with its own history, culture, and socio-political dynamics, felt unsafe because of electoral conflict. She narrates:
“The two contenders began shooting at each other in the city, and it was right in front of my school. I couldn’t find my sister. Pupils were in a total state of panic. When we were able to get to the school, we could see that some young people had passed away and some of the kids had been shot. Today, when I look back, I realize that even if one does not care about politics, when conflict arises, it affects all of us, kids, youth and adults. When the soldiers were shouting at each other, they didn’t care about the fact that they were close to schools, they did care about the psychological problem and trauma pupils experienced due to the shouting and the young people who lost their lives that day. No, they didn’t care about all that. And I’m still asking myself how can one gain justice in conflict?”
Marie-Rose is a firm believer that the misdiagnosis of the root causes of conflict can often lead to a stagnation of conflict. She emphasizes that though this shooting happened in Kinshasa, Kinshasa, as a city, is not a violent place. Most conflict happens in the suburbs; painting the whole city as a ‘dangerous place’ can take away the attention from the root cause of the conflict. For example, the conflict in the rural areas is often projected as a ‘tribal or an ethnic clash.’ Instead, her research and professional experience has shown that the conflict can be about completely unrelated matters such as tensions over livestock, goats, and land. In other words, there may be economic or financial reasons behind conflict, and not simply ethnic or cultural tensions.
After experiencing this conflict, Marie-Rose was determined to ensure that young people, especially young women become key decision makers and problem solvers in the community. Why? Because for her, the solution to all problems lies within the community and can be solved via dialogue and discussion. She says : “young women are important for decision-making. However, in most meetings of political parties, there are no women. We need women in these rooms. Their voices and experiences are important.’’
As a Program Officer at the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in the RDC, she became involved in all the programs the Institute was implementing in the country from election scenario planning, women leadership academy, inter-party dialogue, positive masculinity to gender analysis of women participation at the last election. All these programs involved working closely with party leaders, male and female political leaders. These gave her the opportunities to get in high spaces of decision-making, to get close to politicians from all different political tendencies and trained political women who are now in positions of power. In some instances she had to travel with party leaders in remote zones for days to give them the opportunities to put into practice what they had learned from different NDI programs. Going to remote zones gave her the possibility to see first hand the reality of the lack of effective women participation in politics and helped party leaders get closer to their political constituency.
Her work with the NDI-RDC earned her recognition. She worked with the Department of Gender of NDI in Washington DC in shaping programs that could enhance the capacity building of women on the ground and increase their participation in the party’s leadership. She believes that the voices of young women are important as they bring in experiences, analysis, and key knowledge to understand the multi-layered nature of conflicts or the lack of participation of youth in certain categories.
For her, this goes back to the larger principle of collaboration as one young person, or youth group cannot achieve it all. She emphasizes that she works with women, youth, civil society actors and political parties because each stakeholder is important. By working at the National Democratic Institute in the DRC she actively practiced collaboration and trained youth and women to become competitive candidates in elections. By training young women to be government officials and elected leaders, Marie-Rose is among the growing community of peacebuilders, who believe that women in public office are important to uphold democratic values of peace and justice, and empower marginalized voices.
This work is often difficult too, as she mentions how she has to train senior women who have twenty to thirty years of experience. Despite the difference in age, as a young female peacebuilder, Marie-Rose has made a positive impact in the lives of the senior female peacebuilders. For example, some of the senior female leaders benefitted from Marie-Rose’s campaign lessons in their local election campaigns. In Côte d’Ivoire, Marie-Rose actively worked with female peacebuilders with their campaign messages, and in Guinee, a few women she helped train launched their own organizations which further coached women in their local communities. This highlights how Marie-Rose’s leadership helped start a chain of mentorship which not only strengthened existing female empowerment efforts but also helped to start new ones. This further highlights how the peacebuilding efforts of young people are intergenerational, as they impact several generations of women.
Marie-Rose reflects how she often has seen senior women crying while expressing the difficult situations they have had to deal with due to their work. For example, she says,
“Once we had a session on storytelling and asked women to simply tell their story. Women began to hug and cry with each other. Some women shared how they were kicked out of some political meetings. Sometimes, we just need to have to listen to those women and give them a space to express themselves. They’ve been in politics for more than 20 years before I was born, but still, in my capacity as a trainer, I do take time to listen to them in that safe space created through NDI’s program.”
These challenging moments strengthen Marie-Rose’s determination to not only empower women but also tackle the root causes which prevent young women from becoming government leaders.
This profile of courage, highlighting the work and experiences of Marie-Rose Tshite, was written by Khushboo Shah for Search for Common Ground in January 2022.
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