Music Fund
Who: Give Music a Chance Norway
What: Supporting Music Fund with instruments and funding
Where: DR Congo and Haiti
Project Period: 2024-2026
About the project
Give Music a Chance – Norway (GMAC) has collaborated with Music Fund since 2019, supporting their projects with musical instruments and funding. In dialogue with Music Fund, we have chosen projects in DR Congo and Haiti to collaborate on in 2025.
In DR Congo, we will help develop craft guitar making in the Kivu region, to enable Congolese musicians to have access to instruments made using human and material resources of the region. This will create a sustainable alternative to the current trend towards importing low-quality, industrially produced instruments, which hinders the integration of artisanal activities into the local economy.
In addition, instrument repairers in the Global South are often faced with a twofold problem: the difficulty of generating enough income to buy parts and consumables needed to carry out their work, and the lack of access to those in countries where they are often not commercialized. This is particularly true in Haiti and the DRC, two of the poorest countries in the world.
We will therefore support the development of local production of parts and consumables for wind instruments repair in the DRC and Haiti, together with Haitian wind instrument repairer Herold Jean-Pierre. Bold, forward-looking and highly professional, Herold seems to us to be the ideal person to pursue this research and develop methods and prototypes that could be replicated in other countries, especially in DRC.
In Haiti, we will also support workshops in piano tuning and guitar repair in northern Haiti. To reinforce its impact and to reach the greatest number of people and music teaching structures as possible, these workshops will be open to all music schools in Northern Haiti.
Access to quality musical education is limited for the Haitian population – and particularly for the most vulnerable. Music Fund will therefore ship 250 musical instruments to Haiti to improve access to musical instruments in good playing condition. The shipment will include approximately 50 instruments from GMAC.
About the organisation
Give Music a Chance – Norway (GMAC) is a non-profit organization that works to provide musical instruments for children and young people. We collect used and broken musical instruments, repair them and donate them to music schools in among others DR Congo, Haiti, Mozambique and Palestine. The last two years, GMAC has also established local projects where instruments are lent out for free to young people who would like to play an instrument.
Our philosophy is based on two basic pillars:
1. Music must become sustainable, and we reuse instruments and train instrument repair technicians to maintain and repair instruments.
2. Music is a tool for development, and we want to give young people the opportunity to experience the joy of music.
Music Fund is a Belgian nonprofit organization that supports music schools and socio-artistic projects in DR Congo, Haiti, Mozambique, Morocco and Palestine. Its mission is to give young people living in those regions, which are either marked by conflict or poverty, the chance to practice music in suitable conditions. Music Fund works to strengthen the sustainability of its partner projects by improving their access to musical instruments. The association also aims to create a network of local musical instrument repair technicians, to develop their technical abilities and to provide them with the necessary infrastructure and tools to carry out their work.
