Honored with USA Weekend Magazine’s “Most Caring Athlete Award,” NBA All-Star Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean Jacques Mutombo of the Houston Rockets has long been dedicated to improving the health, education and quality of life for the people in his birthplace, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mutombo is the Chairman and President of the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation.

Created in 1997, the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation is attempting to eradicate many childhood diseases that have virtually disappeared in developed countries while those diseases are still life threatening to children in the Congo everyday. Because infections caused by poor sanitary conditions are a serious threat to both children and adults in the Congo, one of the Foundation's most important goals is to improve the present public health facilities that are currently lacking in both medical supplies and trained personnel. One major project of the Foundation is the construction of a new general hospital, the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital in the capital city of Kinshasa. The new hospital opened on December 1, 2007 and is the first new medical facility of its kind to be built in the Congo in almost 40 years.

Last December, Dikembe Mutombo was invited to join the Board of Advisors for Opportunity International. Opportunity International-U.S. strives to reach the world's poorest people through its micro enterprise development programs. Mutombo is helping the organization prepare its entry into his home country, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In September 2007, while on a goodwill tour for the NBA, Mutombo visited Mozambique where Opportunity International is already serving the poor. He toured the bank and visited loan and savings clients in marketplaces in the capital city of Maputo.

Having played basketball in the NBA for almost two decades, Mutombo spends the off-season traveling throughout Africa on behalf of the NBA, performing at free basketball clinics for as many as 2,000 children per day. Giving back has always been a trademark of Mutombo ever since he entered the NBA in 1991. As a former spokesman for CARE, the international relief agency, Mutombo visited the Somali refugee camps in Northern Kenya in 1993 and traveled with NBA Commissioner David Stern and Georgetown colleagues Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning to Cape Town and Johannesburg. Mutombo is also the first Youth Emissary for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).