Objective - Providing support to female victims of sexual violence and their children.

Achieving such an objective, with sustainable results, can only be done in cooperation  with a local organisation with strong leadership. In this spirit, the King Baudouin Foundation has been working for many years with Dr. Denis Mukwege, gynecologist and Director of the Panzi Hospital.

For many years, Dr. Mukwege has devoted his life to the medical, psychological and social care of thousands of female victims of sexual violence in the Kivu region. Beyond his work at the Panzi Hospital, Dr. Mukwege has also achieved international recognition for his untiring advocacy on behalf of these victims. Denis Mukwege is a Congolese citizen who has taken the initiative of bringing practical solutions to the problems of his country and its people and contributing to restoring dignity to the victims of sexual violence and access to healthcare in the DRC.

In 2011, Dr. Mukwege was awarded the King Baudouin International Development Prize. The Selection Committee for the award had already highlighted in the reasons for its choice, that Dr. Denis Mukwege had been chosen "(…) because of his profound engagement to his native country, advocating relentlessly for a return to peace in a region in which terror and fear are destroying the very fabric of society."

In 2018, Dr. Mukwege became the joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, together with the young Yazidi Nadia Murad.

The General Referral Hospital of Panzi is a referral center for the healthcare sector in the city of Bukavu. Through its missions of care, prevention, teaching and research, it constitutes a center of excellence in medicine. The hospital covers all general and specialised disciplines and has multidisciplinary technical resources that meet the most demanding medical requirements. The Panzi General Referral Hospital is engaged in the provision of safe, quality and ongoing care for its patients. Its vision is to be a hospital for training, that is competitive and a center of excellence in healthcare for everyone.

The hospital has 450 beds and 42 doctors. Since 1999, the hospital has cared for over 50,000 women who have survived sexual violence and more than 40,000 women with gynaecological pathologies. The hospital also treats survivors infected with the HIV/AIDS virus.

Dr. DENIS MUKWEGE says: “I want you to know how much your support means to us. It saves lives, helping to pay for medicine and medical equipment to treat women who come to the Panzi Hospital physically destroyed after having been raped."