[5] The aim of the sanctuary is to collect young bonobos, most having been orphaned due to the actions of poachers, and eventually reintroduce them into a forest reserve.

During the same year, Claudine André started the Friends of Animals in the Congo, of which she is still president.

André was born in Hainaut Province, Belgium, and arrived in Congo as a child, with her father, who was a veterinary surgeon, and has lived there ever since.

When war disrupted daily life in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the 1990s, André worked as a volunteer in Kinshasa Zoo, because the animals had been neglected and were starving.

Elsewhere in the country, people were finding traditional food production difficult, because of the war, and turned instead to bushmeat to feed themselves and their families.