Welcome to KleptoLand – how decades of repression hurt ordinary people in five Central African countries
Central Africa is a region with an unusually high concentration of repressive regimes enriched by oil, gas and other natural resources.
In 2018, a group of economic justice and human rights organisations from Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea formed a coalition called Opening Central Africa (OCA) to coordinate campaigns and research with the aim of shedding light on the harsh realities affecting people in these countries.
Over the past five years, Finance Uncovered has trained and worked with many of the organisations involved.
To coincide with the EU-AU summit in February, OCA released five short video stories about the effects of kleptocracy in each of these countries to spark conversations and inspire citizens to act.
The themes included infant and maternal mortality in Republic of Congo, access to electricity in Chad and youth employment opportunities in Angola.
The Welcome to KleptoLand films were juxtaposed with economic data and evidence of kleptocratic wealth.
Finance Uncovered came up with the film idea and then worked with the groups to script and research data for this project working with Friends of Angola, Data Cameroon, Public Interest Law Center (Chad), Collective Sassoufit (Republic of Congo) and EG Justice as well as the project coordinator, Global Integrity and respected filmmaker, Tom Costello. Music was supplied by Ibibio Sound Machine.
IMPACT! Women groups in Republic of Congo help an event in the immediate aftermath of the film’s release and are organising to take forward a campaign to demand better health facilities.
IMPACT! In Chad, local journalists are following up stories about why so few people have access to electricity.
IMPACT! Numerous significant news follow ups and opinion pieces published including Liberation in France and media in Portugal.
