Congo

First stone of a school

In October 2009, Khaliah Ali travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo with her son Jacob. It was humanitarian work, documented at the time by the World Food Programme itself: in Katanga province she visited WFP and UNICEF projects, including the school at Mfubwana, where 600 children were receiving school meals (WFP release via ReliefWeb, October 29, 2009). Her stop in Kinshasa fell on October 30, 2009.

The Malaika school

The trip's most durable mark is in the village of Kalebuka, near Lubumbashi, where she placed the first stone of the Malaika School — the school for girls built by the Malaika Foundation, founded by Noëlla Coursaris Musunka, who travelled with her. The connection lasted: she spoke at Malaika's tenth-anniversary celebrations in 2017 (The Knockturnal) and in June 2018 she was named a Malaika Advisor.

Still speaking for it

When the Mount Nyiragongo volcano erupted near Goma in May 2021, she spoke about the Congo and its people in an interview with HollywoodLife the following month — a connection to the country that, by then, was more than a decade old.

A note on sources: some older versions of her story named specific newspaper coverage of the 2009 trip that researchers in November 2026 could not locate in any archive. This page relies only on the World Food Programme's own release and the Malaika Foundation's record, linked above.