Ten Years, Millions Displaced: The Democratic Republic of Congo's Missing and Separated Children

The Democratic Republic of the Congo enters its eleventh consecutive year of overlapping armed conflict in 2026, and by several UN measures it now holds the unwanted title of the world's largest internal displacement crisis. In the east — North Kivu, South Kivu, and Ituri provinces above all — the M23 rebellion's renewed offensive since late 2021, and its dramatic escalation through the January 2025 capture of Goma and the February 2025 capture of Bukavu, has driven repeated, cascading waves of displacement on top of decades-old fighting involving more than 100 other armed groups. Children are displaced, recruited into armed groups, abducted for ransom or forced labor, separated from parents in the chaos of flight, or killed and injured outright, at a scale that has made DRC one of the deadliest places in the world to be a child in the past decade.

As with other protracted crises, there is no single national register of "missing children" in the DRC. What exists is a patchwork of figures from different agencies, tracking different things on different timelines: displacement tracking counts, UN-verified grave-violation reports, refugee registrations in neighboring countries, and ICRC family-tracing caseloads. This report gathers the clearest of those figures, cites where each comes from, and is explicit about what is not known.

DRC, at a glance — 2025–2026 figures

Displacement: a record that keeps breaking, then partly reversing

Displacement inside DRC hit its highest recorded level in the country's history in April 2025, when IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix and OCHA reporting put the internally displaced population at more than 7.3 million people, following M23's capture of Goma (27 January 2025) and Bukavu (16 February 2025), each of which triggered forced displacement of well over a million people in a matter of weeks. OCHA's 2025 Humanitarian Response Plan, launched shortly before that escalation, had already set the planning figure at 7.8 million IDPs out of 21.2 million Congolese affected by conflict, disaster, and epidemics combined. By 2026, OCHA reporting shows that figure easing to roughly 5.8 million, reflecting an estimated 1.9 million IDP returns — a reminder that these are not one-way, static populations, and that "displaced" and "returned" both carry protection risks for children, including separation during movement in either direction.

Funding has not kept pace with need. Facing a severe shortfall, the humanitarian community's 2026 response plan requires an estimated €1.4 billion to reach 14.9 million people in need, but planners say the response will in practice be able to prioritize only around 7.3 million of them.

Child recruitment: DRC's decade-long ranking among the worst in the world

UNICEF's own country page states that an estimated 10,000 children are associated with one or more of the more than 140 armed groups operating across DRC — a figure that has remained roughly constant across multiple years of "Children, Not Soldiers" campaign reporting, underlining how entrenched recruitment is rather than how recently it began. The UN's annual Children and Armed Conflict verification process recorded DRC reaching record levels of grave violations against children for three consecutive years through 2023, including 730 verified child abductions in 2022 — the highest number ever verified by the UN in the country to that point. Recorded cases of sexual violence against children then rose a further nearly 30 percent in 2024, reaching close to 45,000 recorded cases against children that year, representing almost 40 percent of all reported sexual-violence cases nationwide.

The 2025 M23 offensive produced an even sharper spike. UNICEF reported that verified grave violations against children tripled in the month following the 24 January 2025 escalation, with abductions up sixfold, killing and maiming up sevenfold, and attacks on schools and hospitals up twelvefold compared with the prior month. Save the Children documented more than 400 children recruited into conflict in eastern DRC in just the first two months of 2025. Separately, UN monitoring found that from January through June 2024, 387 children were abducted across Ituri, North Kivu, South Kivu, and Tanganyika provinces, with ISIS-DRC (ADF), M23, and CODECO militia identified as responsible for most cases. Since the January 2025 escalation, UNICEF and partners have screened 5,639 people (including 302 women and girls) being demobilized from armed groups nationally, identifying and beginning reintegration support for 63 children; separately, in the areas most affected by the 2025 escalation, UNICEF reports having identified 1,200 children affected and reunited 720 of them with family.

Sexual violence against children in the 2025 escalation

UN and UNICEF monitoring found that children made up between 35 and 45 percent of nearly 10,000 rape and sexual-violence cases reported in eastern DRC in just January and February 2025 — a period the UN has described as seeing a child raped roughly every half hour at the conflict's most intense point. In one documented week (27 January–2 February 2025), the number of rape cases treated across 42 monitored health facilities in the east jumped fivefold, with about 30 percent of those treated being children.

Crossing borders: refugee children and family separation

UNHCR and 107 partner organizations appealed for $781 million in 2025 to support more than 1 million Congolese refugees and asylum-seekers in neighboring countries, with Uganda alone hosting more than half that total (roughly 644,537 people registered at the start of 2025). Flight across borders has repeatedly separated children from their families: Save the Children documented at least 76 cases of unaccompanied or separated children among roughly 35,000 refugees who crossed into Burundi during one surge of the crisis, split between the Rugombo (43 cases) and Gihanga (33 cases) transit centers. In Uganda, UNICEF and partner monitoring found that of Congolese refugees arriving at a rate of around 869 people per day during a 2025 surge, 61 percent were children, with hundreds of them unaccompanied or separated from parents. By December 2025, a further Rwanda-backed rebel advance pushed more than 84,000 additional people into Burundi in weeks, and over 200,000 total, according to UNHCR — each new wave carrying fresh risk of family separation that outpaces any agency's ability to track it case by case.

ICRC and family tracing: DRC in a rising global caseload

The ICRC-led Family Links Network reported more than 284,000 people registered as missing worldwide by the end of 2024, a roughly 68 percent increase since 2019, with more than 16,000 people located and over 7,000 reunited with family that year through combined ICRC, National Society, and family efforts. DRC contributes to that global caseload: the DRC Red Cross, supported by the ICRC, operates phone-based tracing services for people who lose contact with family during displacement, and in areas without phone or postal access, volunteers hand-deliver Red Cross messages — in some cases by bicycle over long distances to remote villages. We could not find a DRC-specific, publicly published tally of active missing-persons cases or reunifications from the ICRC comparable to the global or Africa-regional totals; that gap is itself worth naming rather than papering over with an estimate.

Reading these numbers responsibly

References

• UN OCHA. "Facing a critical funding gap, the humanitarian community in DRC is forced to strictly prioritize its response in 2026." unocha.org — DRC 2026 response prioritization
• UN OCHA. "Democratic Republic of the Congo: Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (HNRP) 2026 — At a glance." unocha.org — DRC HNRP 2026 at a glance
• IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix. "Data Update: Violence and Crisis — Democratic Republic of the Congo," April 2025. dtm.iom.int — DRC violence & crisis update
• UNICEF. "DR Congo: Children killed, injured, abducted, and face sexual violence in conflict at record levels for third consecutive year," 2023. unicef.org — record levels, third consecutive year
• UNICEF. "Reports of grave violations against children in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo tripled in last month," February 2025. unicef.org — grave violations tripled
• UNICEF DR Congo. "Children, not soldiers." unicef.org/drcongo — children not soldiers
• UN News. "UNICEF sounds alarm over child crisis in eastern DR Congo," February 2025. news.un.org — child crisis alarm
• Al Jazeera. "Child sexual violence rates rise in first two months of 2025 in DRC — UN," April 2025. aljazeera.com — child sexual violence rise
• Save the Children. "More than 400 children in eastern DRC recruited into conflict in first two months of 2025." savethechildren.net — 400 children recruited
• Save the Children. "Sharp increase in unaccompanied and separated children arriving in Burundi as violence escalates in eastern DRC." savethechildren.org — unaccompanied children, Burundi
• UNHCR. "UNHCR and partners urgently seek funding as Congolese refugee numbers soar," 2025. unhcr.org — Congolese refugee numbers soar
• Al Jazeera. "Tens of thousands flee DR Congo to Burundi after rebel takeover of key city," December 2025. aljazeera.com — Burundi displacement, Dec 2025
• UNICEF Uganda. "Hundreds of unaccompanied and separated Congolese refugee children enter Uganda." unicef.org/uganda — unaccompanied children
• ICRC. "Number of missing people registered with the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement up nearly 70% in five years." icrc.org — missing people up 70% in five years
• ICRC. "Africa: Cases of missing persons registered with ICRC rise 75 per cent in five years." icrc.org — Africa missing persons rise
• UN News. "DR Congo: Children reportedly killed in summary executions by M23 fighters," February 2025. news.un.org — summary executions by M23
• Human Rights Watch. "'Death Was Everywhere': Arbitrary Detention, Killings, and Forced Recruitment by the M23 and the Rwanda Defence Force," 2026. hrw.org — Death Was Everywhere
• Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. "The kidnapping business: Criminality in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo." globalinitiative.net — kidnapping business, eastern DRC
• ACAPS. "Democratic Republic of the Congo" country analysis. acaps.org/countries/drc

Compiled from publicly available UN, humanitarian-cluster, ICRC, and news reporting current as of August 2026. Figures come from different reporting periods, geographic scopes, and methodologies and are not directly additive. This report is independent research and is not itself a missing-persons record — to report a missing child, use the ChildTrace reporting tool.