Dr Denis Mukwege is a world-renowned gynaecologist, human rights activist and Nobel Peace laureate from east DRC. He has become the world’s leading specialist in treating survivors of wartime sexual violence, and a global campaigner against the use of rape as a weapon of war.

As a child Denis Mukwege accompanied his father, a pastor, to visit the sick in Bukavu, a city in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the shore of Lake Kivu. One day they went to see a terminally-ill boy. They prayed for him but were unable to do more.

Mukwege was eight years old at that time and decided after this experience that he would become a doctor. He told his father: “You can pray, but I will give medicines.”

Dr Denis Mukwege campaigns globally to bring the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war to an end. Together with the Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, Dr Mukwege received the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for his “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.” He has received numerous awards for his work, including the UN Human Rights Prize (2008), the Right Livelihood Award (2013) and the Sakharov Prize of the European Parliament (2014). TIME magazine listed him among the world’s 100 most influential persons and the Carter Foundation named him a ‘citizen of the world.’