In the hill villages of South Kivu, which for years have been in the thick of Congo's bitter civil wars, something is changing.

The women, so often victims of violence, often sexual, are finding their voices. On the muddy roads surrounding Bukavu, the regional capital, some of those victims are still clearly visible.

In a land where the bicycles belong to the men and the soldiers ride the trucks, ragged, ill-shod, undernourished women porters strain under sacks often twice their own weight.

They bear testament to what women at the bottom of the heap are forced to do to put food on the table.

For whatever reason - and there are many to chose from in this complicated land - they have no alternative but to struggle to earn just 20 cents a day shouldering other people's merchandise from place to place.

After years of conflict, eastern Congo is home to some of the most isolated, most fragile and poorest communities in the world.

Good roads, clean accessible water, sanitation and strong primary healthcare are still just a dream.

Collective community action is the only way to deliver these basic services, but to succeed everyone must be involved, including those who have suffered the most - the former combatants, the war widows and female heads of household, the ex-child soldiers, those returning from displacement and those still displaced.

Aid agencies like the International Rescue Committee (IRC) are trying to help rebuid strong communities where even those porters will have a voice. If anyone is excluded they will remain disaffected and the cycle of violence and grinding poverty will never be broken.

In one of the many teeming suburbs of Bukavu that spread into the hills behind the faded splendour of the villas lining Lake Kivu - left over from the days of Joseph Mobutu's corrupt decades-long dictatorship - is a battered old compound hiding a powerhouse of community spirit.

It has the ponderous name of AMALDEFEA, an acronym for a long stream of French words that basically mean Association of Anti-Crime Mothers for Abandoned Orphans and Children.

It's a lively group, mainly women, who have joined together to improve conditions for war widows, those violated during the war, orphans, abandoned children and child mothers.

Having run the gauntlet of happy screaming children on break from the rundown school for orphans across the yard, we find ourselves sitting in a darkened room festooned with handwritten charts outlining programmes and projects in which, with our support, this group is involved.

We hear about their income-generating projects for destitute women, their information centre, their mothers' groups and, most importantly, about the civil rights facilitators who they train to teach local people their basic human rights.

The women around the table are eager to tell us what they have achieved so far after years of marginalisation.

Their favourite story is how recently thirty of them staged a day-long sit-in outside a police station, noisily refusing to leave until the local commander had released one of their own who had been summarily arrested for not paying a bribe.

They are bubbling with confidence, proud of their new-found power, which is finally helping them make a difference.

They send us to the small village of Muku, where a meeting of the local civil rights facilitators is just about to begin.

A dozen people have gathered, the deputy village head, the local headmaster and the protestant pastor, but it is again the women who most impress.

There are two representatives of the mothers of the village, catholic Theresa and protestant Amelia, the local midwife and a teacher called Barhazar, whose eloquent response as to why she joined the group I will always remember.

Human rights, she says, are very personal, they mould one's identity, and they are all important.

We ask how their training translates into action and they talk of helping resolve land and family disputes, preventing summary arrests, ridding the roads of illegal toll barriers - the bane of the lives of those poor porters - and generally helping bring a lasting peace to an area that has almost forgotten what the word means.

As we prepare to leave, Barhazar, backed by enthusiastic nods from the others, says that their committee is providing a counterbalance to the power of the local authorities.

She doesn't say, but she doesn't need to, that it is those authorities that have, in the past, been synonymous with corruption, abuse of power and flagrant human rights violations.

Read more from IRC's Lydia Gomersall in Congo:

Why are Congo's babies dying?

How does a Congolese village decide what to do with $30,000?

Congo's road to health care is full of potholes

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