Heri Bitamala is the Founder CEO of the CERC. His background has included roles across several fields, including anti-corruption, equity and social inclusion, technology, health and education. For more than 8 years, he has led programs and projects in South Kivu, North Kivu, and Kinshasa and researched corruption and governance, youth participation, equity, and social inclusion.

At Centre de Recherche sur l’Anti-Corruption, Heri Bitamala leads work on including children at risk of exclusion and promoting the whole exercise of their human rights. He designed and implemented a more rigorous approach to international aid and public services monitoring, adding the participation of disabled young people in the programming and has been active in addressing the equity and inclusion issues in the DRC education sector. He has written extensively about access to Information, corruption in the public and private sector, governance, and equity and inclusion in the education sector, among other topics.

To date, Heri’s initiatives have directly trained over 3,000 young people as community monitors in 3 provinces (South Kivu, North Kivu and Kinshasa) and 100 social entrepreneurs in Uvira, who together have created and implemented solutions from ensuring drinking water is accessible and clean, schools accessible and safe, education is accessible to children at risk of exclusion, to sorting our rubbish collection in urban areas. Their work can be shown to have benefitted over 1 million people through improved services and infrastructure.