The Central African Republic's economy: most of it off the books

How any Central African came to dig for diamonds

The mining economy began as a concession. France paid for the occupation of Ubangi-Shari by handing the territory to private companies, and 27 concessionary companies were set up across the Oubangui and Ouham basins in the colony's first decades. Wikipedia's country article records that they forced people to harvest rubber and coffee without pay, and held families hostage until quotas were met. During the 1930s cotton became a cash crop alongside tea and coffee, and the mining of diamonds and gold began in earnest. Cotton companies were granted purchasing monopolies over whole districts and fixed the prices paid to growers.

Independence changed who could dig. During his first presidency, which began at independence on 13 August 1960, David Dacko ended the concessionary companies' monopoly on mining and decreed that any Central African could dig for diamonds. Production rose sharply. He also had a diamond-cutting factory built in Bangui, and he enlarged the civil service so far that salaries took a much larger share of the national budget.

Diamond mining has stayed in the hands of individual diggers since. Wikipedia's economy article describes industry as under 20% of GDP and made up mostly of artisanal diamond mining, breweries and sawmills.

Under Jean-Bédel Bokassa the trade moved into one man's hands. Britannica's account of his rule says the diamond trade was personally administered by Bokassa and that most of its profits stayed with him while the government's debt mounted. France kept supporting his administration, on the same account, because it wanted to retain control of the country's diamond output and its potential uranium. On 10 October 1979 Le Canard enchaîné reported that Bokassa had given thirty carats of diamonds to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, President of France since 1974, and the affair became known in France as Diamondgate.

Why the diamond figures never agree

The published shares of export earnings for diamonds disagree with one another, and the disagreement is wide.

The spread has a plain cause. The same Wikipedia passages that give those shares estimate that between 30% and 50% of the diamonds produced each year leave the country clandestinely, and a stone that never passes a customs desk never enters the denominator. Britannica names the continued smuggling of diamonds across the border as one of the strains on the economy in the 1990s. Diamond traders from western Africa and from Chad live in Bangui and in the mining districts, and Belgium, on Britannica's account, buys most of the diamond exports.

The law draws the line at the buyer. The United Kingdom's travel advice, read in October 2026, states that it is only legal to buy diamonds or precious stones through government-authorised agents. A sale to anyone else falls outside the law and outside the export figures.

Minerals have also paid for armed control of the ground they lie in. By 2015 armed entrepreneurs had carved out fiefdoms where they set checkpoints, collected illegal taxes and took in millions of dollars from the illicit coffee, mineral and timber trades. In March 2022 Wagner Group fighters launched an offensive against armed groups in the north during which they reportedly killed hundreds of civilians, most of them artisanal miners. In its 2026 country overview the World Bank counts 470 mining sites, and describes mining as the main driver of growth: it brings in export revenue and creates few jobs.

What cassava pays that cotton cannot

The crop that earns a household money is the one it eats. Food crops are rarely exported, but Central Africans earn far more from the periodic sale of surplus food than from cotton or coffee, so the food crops are the country's real cash crops. Wikipedia's economy article puts the contrast in tonnes: cassava production runs between about 200,000 and 300,000 tonnes a year and cotton, the main export crop, between 25,000 and 45,000. The same article's 2019 production list gives 730,000 tonnes of cassava for that year, well above its own range, which is another figure that depends on who counted.

The work divides by sex, Britannica records. Men clear the fields and women do most of the cultivating, of cassava, maize, millet, sorghum, rice, squash and groundnuts, for their families. Many rural and urban women also turn part of the harvest into sorghum beer or distilled liquor and sell it, and that income is mostly unrecorded.

This is why the country's best-known statistic misleads. The income per head usually quoted for the Central African Republic, about $400 a year in Wikipedia's account, rests mostly on reported export sales. It leaves out the unregistered sale of food, home-brewed alcohol, diamonds, ivory, bushmeat and traditional medicine, which for most Central Africans is the larger economy. In 2013, 74% of the population worked in agriculture.

The size of farming in the accounts depends on the source as well. Wikipedia's economy article says 55% of GDP comes from agriculture, Britannica says half, and the World Bank's own series puts agriculture, forestry and fishing at 27.6% of GDP in 2025.

Livestock is held back by the tsetse fly, which limits where cattle can be kept, while herds migrating from Chad and Sudan keep adding animals. Pond-raised tilapia and river fish supply a substantial share of the protein in the diet.

How goods reach the sea from Bangui

The country has no railway, and the paved road network is short: 429 kilometres in Wikipedia's figure, about 600 in Britannica's. Most foreign trade therefore moves by water. Britannica puts about five-sevenths of it on the rivers, and the normal route out runs down the Ubangi and the middle Congo from Bangui to Brazzaville, where goods transfer to the railway for the Atlantic port of Pointe-Noire.

The river port at Bangui handles most of the country's international trade, with 350 metres of wharf and a cargo capacity of 350,000 tons. The river is the weak link. Wikipedia's economy article states that river traffic on the Ubangi is impossible from April to July, while Britannica and the country article describe the route as navigable for most of the year; the two agree that it closes for part of it. The roads have the opposite season, and some become impassable in the rains from July to October.

Fuel arrives the same two ways, by barge up the Ubangi or by truck overland through Cameroon, and both produce frequent shortages of petrol, diesel and jet fuel. Internal flights are irregular because aviation fuel is unreliable. The Douala to Bangui road is the second corridor, and plans to connect Bangui by rail to the Transcameroon Railway have existed since at least 2002.

Weight decides which exports survive this. Cotton bales, coffee sacks and sawn timber wait for a barge or a convoy. A parcel of diamonds does not. The transport system that makes bulk exports slow and expensive is the same one that makes the lightest export the easiest to move outside it. Since 2008 every non-exempt import and export has needed an electronic cargo tracking note, an attempt to put traceable paper on goods crossing the border.

The 50% devaluation of the CFA franc on 12 January 1994 made dearer every import that had made the long trip in. Britannica records that it put medicine and diesel out of reach of many Central Africans, even as diamond, timber, coffee and cotton exports rose and GDP grew by an estimated 7% in 1994.

Who has profited from the timber of Lobaye

Rainforest covers much of the south-west, and in 2014 forest products such as timber brought in US$59.3 million, 40% of export earnings that year. Logging has produced some of the best-documented payments in the country's economic record, because the payments were investigated.

During the Séléka government of 2013, according to a United Nations Security Council report cited by Wikipedia, three foreign loggers, the French Industrie forestière de Batalimo, the Lebanese SEFCA and the Chinese Vicwood Group, made illegal tax payments totalling €3.7 million to the Ministry of Finance, as well as monthly payments to Séléka fighters to protect their sites. SEFCA paid a further advance of €380,876 directly to the government. In 2014 the same companies paid about €127,864 to anti-balaka militias at road checkpoints.

The trade did not stop when the governments changed. CEMAC banned the export of raw timber in January 2022, and the Central African Republic did not apply the ban. Since 2021 the timber trade has been linked to a three-way arrangement between government officials, the Wagner Group and Bois Rouge, a company from Saint Petersburg, with Wagner logging a forest in Lobaye. The mercenaries reportedly emptied villages to log at almost no cost, for a potential revenue of up to $890 million on international markets.

The forest is also a conservation question. Britannica notes that logging and diamond digging both take place in areas of high biodiversity, and that the 1990s brought conflicts between state agencies, multinational logging firms, artisanal miners, conservation groups and villagers looking for work with the loggers. The African Development Bank records that the country has since adopted a forestry code and regulations for REDD+ carbon payments.

How the civil war cut income per head

The series turns on 2013. Real GDP shrank by 36.4% that year in both the World Bank and IMF figures, after the Séléka coalition took Bangui in March, and GDP in current dollars dropped from $2.5 billion in 2012 to $1.7 billion in 2013. Consumer prices rose 14.9% in 2014.

A study using the synthetic control method, which builds a counterfactual Central African Republic out of comparable countries, estimates that the conflict cut GDP per head by 45.3 to 47.8% over the decade from 2013 to 2022. That is a cumulative loss of US$29.7 billion to US$32.4 billion at purchasing power parity. Its most conservative reading still finds a fall of 35.3%. The finding is reinforced by GDP estimated from night-time lights and population data, an alternative measure for places where official statistics are thin.

The same study offers an explanation. The war cut both trade corridors, the road from Douala and the river from Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville, most severely while Séléka held the capital. Infrastructure decayed because the state could not afford to maintain it, and the technical capacity of firms and of the administration was worn down.

Earlier shocks followed the same route through the capital. Military rebellions in 1996 destroyed property in Bangui and GDP fell by 2%. Britannica traces the unrest of the 1990s to corruption and financial mismanagement that left the government unable to pay soldiers and public servants. By the end of 2025 the World Bank counted 428,000 displaced people inside the country and 719,000 refugees outside it.

What the state collects and who pays the rest

The state sees little of the economy and collects less. The World Bank's 2026 overview puts domestic revenue at 7.0% of GDP. The African Development Bank gives the tax burden for 2025 as 10% of GDP, and the World Bank's data series records tax revenue of 8.2% of GDP in 2021. Three figures for one ratio, each divided by a GDP built mostly from what is reported.

Deficits have run since the early 1980s. The country entered a structural adjustment programme in 1986 under pressure from the World Bank and the IMF, the IMF approved an adjustment facility in 1998, and in June 2025 the IMF board completed the third and fourth reviews of the current Extended Credit Facility and approved a US$58 million disbursement. On 30 September 2026 the country owed the IMF SDR 190.79 million.

Public debt is reported three ways. The African Development Bank puts it at 59% of GDP in 2025, the IMF at 61.8% for the same year, and the World Bank projects 42.5% for 2026. Each lender divides by its own estimate of GDP.

Outside money fills the gap. A UNDP official quoted by Mehler in a 2005 study called the Central African Republic a country "sous serum", on a drip. More than US$100 million in foreign aid was spent in the country in 2019, mostly on humanitarian assistance, and the presence of peacekeepers, foreign organisations and refugee camps is itself a source of income for many Central Africans. The 2024 to 2028 National Development Plan is costed at US$12.8 billion, and the African Development Bank notes that the country's fragility restricts it to concessional loans and grants.

Why Bangui adopted bitcoin with few bank accounts

In April 2022 the government announced that bitcoin would become legal tender. The decision met a financial system that reaches almost nobody. Fewer than 1% of the population hold a bank account, microfinance supplies 1% of credit and serves 0.5% of people, and mobile phone penetration stands at about 30%, all figures from Wikipedia's economy article without a stated year. Banks and microfinance institutions have pulled their business back into Bangui for security reasons, and several commercial banks are partly French-owned. The currency in everyday use is the CFA franc issued by the regional central bank, BEAC.

Electricity is the other limit. Access was 15.6% nationally in Wikipedia's figure, 34.6% in towns and 1.5% in the countryside, and the World Bank's 2026 overview says nearly nine in ten households have no electricity. What power there is comes mostly from water: dams on the Mbali Lim River north-west of Bangui produce about four-fifths of it, and renewable sources supplied 96.5% of electricity in 2021. The World Bank's US$113 million PARSE project is financing transmission and distribution. Internet use reached 13.8% of the population in 2024, and the African Development Bank credits part of the growth in 2025 to the rollout of 4G.

Which forecasts the lenders publish for growth

The lenders do not agree on the recent past. For 2025 the African Development Bank reports real growth of 3.3%, the World Bank's data series 4.5% and the IMF 4.8%. The World Bank's 2026 overview also describes part of the 2025 figure as a one-off statistical boost that is now fading. GDP for 2025 stood at $3.1 billion in current dollars, or $556 a head.

The forecasts are close to each other and below population growth. The World Bank projects 2.8% for 2026 against population growth of 3.4% in 2025, which means living standards for most people falling. The African Development Bank expects 2.9% in 2026 and 3.9% in 2027, and the IMF 2.6% in 2026.

Poverty is measured twice as well. The World Bank's 2026 overview puts extreme poverty at about 67%, 78% in rural areas and 51% in towns. The African Development Bank gives monetary poverty in 2025 as 65%, 72% rural and 60% urban, with underemployment at 62%.