FRANCAISEntraide et Fraternité / Broederlijk Delen - Comments
The mission
-Both EF and BD consider themselves as development NGOs. However, they emanated from a fundraising campaign for the victims of a humanitarian crisis in Congo in 1961. Since then, they have sometimes intervened in the middle of armed conflicts. In Columbia, for instance, BD worked with CRIC (Consejo Regional Indigena del Cauca), a group of indigenous communities that had to form a guard to patrol and protect the area with batons against armed forces and illegal resource extraction when violence flared up in the 2000s. The situation was still tense after a peace agreement between the government and the FARC-EP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia - Ejército del Pueblo) was signed. Over fifty members of the CRIC have been killed between 2016 and 2019.
-Today, EF and BD are mainly working with partners to bring about structural change, fight poverty and combat inequality in rural areas of developing countries. The two organizations are key actors in the Belgian international NGO landscape. They also work together in advocacy networks such as the Climate Justice Platform andCoopération Internationale pour le Développement et la Solidarité (CIDSE).
-However, the missions of EF and BD slightly differ since their split in 1979. Entraide et Fraternité seeks to represent the international solidarity of Wallonia and Brussels’s Christian community. It focuses on four thematic areas: food security, children, civil and political rights, and citizen initiatives that promote international solidarity. Moreover, its website indicates in 2020 that integrating gender and environmental dynamics is central to EF’s mission. Meanwhile, the three pillars of Broederlijk Delen are the right to food, sustainable management of natural resources, and the promotion of civic participation and peace. The NGOs also seeks to promote alternatives to economic growth for development in line with its environmental agenda and its inclination toward sobriety, rooted in their Christian inspiration.
