People with disabilities are vulnerable and need humanitarian assistance for their social inclusion. This facilitates their effective empowerment as actors in their own development, interacting with their living environment. In this way, they make use of their spontaneous/natural resilience to take ownership of any process that can strengthen their capacity for action.However, if, on the one hand, they are the hub of the success of the programs carried out in their favor, external contributions, as factors of induced/assisted resilience and reinforcement mentors, are indispensable to stabilize their empowerment. Programs of assistance, with a view to strengthening their capacity for action and choice, are implemented. They continue, unfortunately, to vegetate in dependency and to convey a culture of chronic poverty. Hence a questioning of the kind of humanitarian assistance policy that has been put in place.Through an inductive approach that has combined field data with that of the bibliography, it emerges that humanitarian assistance remains at the level of survival. The results of the various programmes implemented are mixed. People with disabilities evolve in a vicious circle of non-emancipatory and complicit compassionate assistance.To get out of this, a model of meso-centric policy is presented as an alternative, to help rehabilitation actors to set up better adapted support policies.
In the daily life of people with a motor disability, their support depends on certain parameters that society looks at. Promoting their integration and capabilities also means facilitating access to basic services and taking a critical look at the social and environmental factors that influence their emancipation. This makes it possible to transcend the stereotypical image that other members of the community have of them and to strengthen the tools for self-empowerment available to them.In keeping with the United Nations motto «full participation and equality», PSHMs should no longer play a passive role. They are actors on an equal footing with other members of society. And in addition to strengthening their skills through various social mechanisms that have been put in place, they capitalize on the opportunities that are offered to them, in order to guide their choices with regard to the kind of life they consider fulfilling.These opportunities appear first and foremost as factors on which the process of their empowerment is based. Secondly, they provide them with mentors who support and strengthen their access to further fulfilment.This reflection aims, on the one hand, to circumscribe the factors of empowerment in the process of inclusion of PSHMs in the province of North Kivu, and on the other hand, to highlight the different tutors that strengthen their capacities.The approach adopted focused on data collection, using a triangulation method, combining the questionnaire, interviews and opinion polls of members of families in which PSHMs live, but also of rehabilitation care providers. The study used snowball sampling, both in the different neighbourhoods where they live and in the institutions where PSHMs are cared for.