Invisible Children

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., Invisible Children (IC) is an international non-profit organization working to end violent conflict and exploitation facing our world’s most isolated and unprotected communities. We partner with local visionaries in volatile conflict zones to build community-led initiatives and drive global policy change to end violent conflict and ensure communities have the safety they deserve. When Invisible Children was founded in 2004, our primary aim was to hasten an end to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) crisis in central Africa and support the lasting recovery of communities in the region targeted by the LRA and other armed groups. Our comprehensive approach to the LRA crisis has integrated every level of intervention, from direct partnerships with local communities to advocacy campaigns targeting international policymakers.

Over the course of 12 years working with remote communities in central Africa, we have contributed to significant progress in ending the LRA crisis, while refining and adapting our programs to address violence perpetrated by a number of armed groups and other destabilizing forces threatening the central Africa region. IC’s current work focuses on developing innovative and sustainable solutions to regional insecurity and armed group violence. In recent years, this has included the exploration of community-based initiatives and conflict analysis to address the intersection of human security and illicit wildlife trafficking in the central Africa region.

IC is currently implementing four (4) projects in central Africa. The USAID-funded Community Resilience in Central Africa (CRCA) Activity, is a five-year project that aims to strengthen community resilience to security threats and improve the safety of both humans and wildlife and in the “Mbomou-Uele Border Region,” which spans northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and eastern Central African Republic (CAR). The Community Protection through Community Connection (CPCC) project is an 18-month project funded by the U.S. Department of State and focused community resilience and transitional justice in the “Greater Bria Area” of eastern CAR. In addition to these two U.S. federally-funded projects, IC is implementing a one-year, privately-funded community protection and resilience project in former Western Equatoria State (WES) South Sudan. IC also implements ongoing programming aimed at encouraging and facilitating the safe and peaceful defection, transit, and family reunification of individuals who escape or defect from non-state armed groups, most commonly the LRA, across all of the aforementioned regions of DRC, CAR, and South Sudan. These defection and transit activities are sustained through IC’s general unrestricted funds.