ZOOM: Research among Belgo-Congolese, Belgo-Rwandans and Belgo-Burundians: a nuanced portrait of fellow citizens with African roots

With a population of 110,000 living in Belgium, Belgo- Congolese, Belgo-Rwandan and Belgo-Burundian peo- ple are the third largest group stemming from immigration from outside the European Union. These citizens are not often mentioned in a research context and they seem to be poorly understood in soci- ety, even though Belgium shares a long common his- tory with them.As part of its program on integration and migration, and continuing on from its study of Belgo-Moroccans and Belgo-Turks (2015), the King Baudouin Foundation has asked researchers from UCL, ULg and VUB to meet and to talk to people from these three countries and from other countries in French-speaking sub-Saharan Africa. The aim: to get to know them better and find out their views on a range of issues that affect them.This survey, which is the first of its kind in Belgium, was carried out among a representative sample of 805 people in Belgium’s three regions. The resulting portrait is a nuanced one and is intended as a contribu- tion towards an informed debate. This process is all the more important as Afro-descendants seem to be more and more permanently established in Belgium and are seeing high levels of demographic growth.