Foundation · 1999
Panzi Foundation
The hospital and foundation he founded in Bukavu in 1999. Panzi cares for survivors of sexual violence through a four-pillar model — medical, psychological, legal and socio-economic — and now trains teams across eastern Congo.
He opened Panzi in 1999 to be a maternity hospital. The first patient admitted was not there to give birth: she was a woman who had been raped and shot. Thirty years on, the hospital has become what that first night foretold.
100 000+
Survivantes prises en charge
Depuis 1999. La page de la fondation consacrée au Dr Mukwege indique 91 000 — à confirmer auprès de Panzi.
SourceProgrammes
Medical care
Reconstructive and gynaecological surgery for injuries caused by sexual violence, and maternal care.
Psychosocial support
Counselling and group therapy, because a treated wound is not a rebuilt life.
Legal assistance
Standing with survivors who choose to bring a case, and making that case exist in a courtroom.
Socio-economic reintegration
Training, literacy and income-generating work, so that going home does not mean depending on anyone.
Panzi was born out of a failure. Denis Mukwege had built a maternity hospital at Lemera, in the highlands of South Kivu; it was destroyed during the First Congo War and its patients killed in their beds. He began again in Bukavu, under tents, on marshland in the Panzi quarter.
The hospital was meant to reduce maternal mortality, which remains among the highest in the world. It became something else because the patients arriving were not the ones he expected: women injured by weapons, deliberately, as part of a strategy of war. That observation, repeated thousands of times, made him a witness as much as a surgeon.
The four-pillar model is the answer to what Panzi learned: repairing a body without treating the trauma, without a legal case and without a livelihood sends a woman back precisely to where she was destroyed. The four are inseparable, and that is what makes Panzi more than a hospital.
Today Panzi trains other teams, supports one-stop centres elsewhere in eastern Congo, and houses programmes led by survivors themselves — among them City of Joy and the survivors’ network.
panzifoundation.org