United Front Against Riverblindness
organization
United Front Against Riverblindness (UFAR) is a Non-Governmental Development Organization (NGDO) that provides technical, managerial and financial support for the elimination of riverblindness, or onchocerciasis, in the Kasongo region of Maniema province in the southeast region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
UFAR and its partners use the community-directed treatment with Ivermectin (CDTI) approach recommended by the African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control (APOC), a branch of the World Health Organization (WHO). Each year UFAR ensures the treatment of about one million people in what is referred to as the CDTI Kasongo project to prevent the further transmission of the parasitic disease onchocerciasis to uninfected persons and to halt the progression of the disease in those already infected.
History
United Front Against Riverblindness was formed in 2004 and recognized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. The organization was founded by and is currently led by Executive Director Dr. Daniel Shungu. UFAR has a small headquarters office in Lawrenceville, NJ and operational offices in Kinshasa and Kasongo, DRC. The CDTI Kasongo includes eight health zones.
In 2007 treatment was initiated in the health zone of Kasongo, and in 2008 it was initiated in the health zones of Kunda, Lusangi, Salamabila and Samba. In 2009 it expanded to the remaining health zones of Kabambare, Kampene and Pangi.
Since the community-wide mass treatment of all eligible people must be repeated once a year for 10–15 years, approximately three million tablets of Mectizan (Ivermectin) were distributed in 2009 in all eight health zones by some 4,540 trained community workers.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “United Front Against Riverblindness” as organization. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as organization. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7887794. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004, 2007, 2008 and 2009.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “United Front Against Riverblindness” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.