DR Congo's economy: the cobalt belt and the cassava field

What the Congolese economy sells abroad

Minerals and metal made up 80% of exports from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2023, and nearly all of that was cobalt and copper. China bought 41% of the country's exports in 2024. Zambia, South Africa, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates followed.

Exports have grown faster than the economy around them. Exports of goods and services were worth 11.4% of GDP in 2000 and 43.4% in 2025 in the World Bank series, and their value rose from $13.3 billion in 2017 to $28.5 billion in 2022. Imports kept pace, at 43.9% of GDP in 2025. Britannica lists what they are: foodstuffs, consumer goods, fuel and machinery that is largely mining and transport equipment.

A country that sells metal buys a good part of its food. Cereals and fish arrive in increasing amounts, by Britannica's account, and commercial meat production falls short of what the country eats. Coffee is the main agricultural export, and much of it leaves by smuggling.

The geology behind the exports is spread across the whole territory. The shares of world supply that the sources publish give its scale, and they also show how loosely those shares are kept.

The cobalt reserve row carries a contradiction. The main Wikipedia entry on the country gives it a third of world cobalt reserves in one sentence and 80% in another, and both cannot be true. Valuations of the deposits as a whole are further apart still. A 2011 report put the major mineral reserves at over US$300 billion, while the same entry repeats an undated estimate of more than US$24 trillion for untapped deposits, eighty times as much.

What happened when cobalt exports stopped

The Congolese government suspended cobalt exports from February to October 2025. The World Bank's account of that year records the ban and its effect on mining: output growth slowed to 10.1% in 2025 from 11.9% in 2024, held up by copper production and copper exports. The African Development Bank, measuring the same sector, puts its 2025 growth at 8.2% against the same 11.9% for 2024. The sources on file give the dates of the ban and what happened to output. None of them gives its stated purpose.

Cobalt is what changed the country's position in the 2010s. It goes into the lithium-ion batteries that power many electric vehicles, and in February 2018 the asset manager AllianceBernstein called the Democratic Republic of the Congo "the Saudi Arabia of the electric vehicle age". The main Wikipedia entry adds that cobalt's use in batteries, and in steadying grids with large shares of intermittent renewable power, could make the country an object of growing competition between foreign powers. The Council on Foreign Relations ties the same demand to the eastern conflict: as the world has come to rely on cobalt and copper, local and outside armed groups have gained more reason to involve themselves.

The cobalt comes from the south. The largest mines are in southern Katanga, highly mechanised, with capacities of several million tons of copper and cobalt ore a year and refining of their own. The Luilu Metallurgical Plant there can produce 175,000 tonnes of copper and 8,000 tonnes of cobalt a year; it restarted copper in December 2007 and cobalt in May 2008 after a rehabilitation programme. Coltan, tin, tungsten and much of the gold come from the east instead, where smuggled coltan and cassiterite helped pay for the war.

Outside mining, growth was slower. Non-mining sectors grew 3.1% in 2025 by the World Bank's estimate, mainly in construction and services. The IMF mission that visited Kinshasa from 23 April to 6 May 2026 expected real growth above 5.5% in both 2025 and 2026, with construction, services and agriculture more than offsetting a mild slowdown in extraction. The World Bank's annual series gives 5.8% for 2025, its country overview 5.5%, and the IMF's own series 5.7%.

How Katanga copper replaced wild rubber

The pattern of one export answering one foreign demand is older than the state. Under the Congo Free State, revenue came first from ivory and then from wild rubber, cut from forest vines. John Boyd Dunlop's inflatable bicycle tube of 1887 and the spread of the motor car drove world demand up, it soared in 1896, and by the late 1890s rubber had overtaken ivory as the Free State's main source of revenue. The Force Publique enforced the collection quotas, and failure to meet them was punishable by death. The peak year was 1903.

Rubber then lost its market to plantations. Its share of the Belgian Congo's exports by value fell from 77% to 15% in the early twentieth century, as British colonies in Southeast Asia such as Malaya began to farm it. It returned briefly in the Second World War, after Malaya fell to Japan in January 1942 and the colony became a rubber supplier to the Allies.

Copper had already taken its place. The Union Minière du Haut Katanga exported more than 80,000 tons of copper ore in 1926 alone, much of it for processing at Hoboken in Antwerp, and its activities built a nonferrous metal industry in Belgium. The colony also supplied uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine, which went into the Manhattan Project and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

At independence in 1960 the formal economy rested almost entirely on extracting copper and diamonds, and foreign companies controlled most of it. The people who would have run it had been kept out. There were 16 university graduates in a population of 20 million in 1960, and Congolese held 3 of 5,000 government posts before independence.

How Gécamines became a treasury for patronage

The Union Minière's assets were valued at nearly $430 million in 1965, the year Mobutu Sese Seko took power in a coup, and the new government set out to nationalise it. The struggle ended in a compromise in 1967. A new state company, the Générale des Carrières et des Mines, or Gécamines, took over the Union Minière's operations, and a private management company created by the former owner ran them day to day. The owner changed and the operator stayed.

Britannica calls that arrangement the blueprint for the Zairianisation of the economy, the state's steady acquisition of private businesses through the 1970s. The income of the new state enterprises went to Mobutu and to a patronage network, and control of individual enterprises was handed to associates whose loyalty he needed. The currency was renamed with the country: the zaïre, divided into 100 makuta, replaced the franc, and the Congo became Zaire in 1971.

The copper price fell in the mid-1970s, and audits of the state enterprises found high levels of embezzlement. The IMF began lending to stabilise the economy in 1976. By 1979 purchasing power stood at 4% of its 1960 level. In 1982 the IMF's envoy, Erwin Blumenthal, reported that "the corruptive system in Zaire, with all its wicked and ugly manifestations, its mismanagement and fraud, will destroy all endeavors" toward recovery, and that creditors had no chance of getting their money back. Lending continued. In 1991 the World Bank cut ties with Mobutu after he appropriated $400 million from Gécamines.

What replaced the formal economy after it collapsed

Between 1990 and 1995 the economy shrank at an average rate of 8.42% a year, and average income per person more than halved between 1990 and 2000. By the early 1990s the formal economy had nearly ceased to exist. Most people lived on subsistence farming and informal trade, which Janet MacGaffey described in 1991 as "system D", an economy outside the official one and outside its statistics.

The currency went down with it. A currency reform begun in 1997 was disrupted by the Second Congo War in 1998, the year the Congolese franc replaced the new zaire. In January 1999 the government banned the use of US dollars in domestic commercial transactions, a position it later adjusted, and it paid for its spending by printing money. Consumer prices rose 513.9% in 2000 by the World Bank's count and 550.0% by the IMF's. New banknotes followed in 2003.

How far inflation returned after the war

The sources disagree on how far prices ran again. The Wikipedia article on the Second Congo War calls 2007 to 2009 a period of hyperinflation. The IMF's annual series records 16.7% in 2007, 18.0% in 2008 and 46.1% in 2009, high figures that stop far short of 2000. Prices rose 35.7% in 2017 and 17.7% in 2024, then 7.4% in 2025 as the central bank held its policy rate high and the franc stabilised.

Why the dollar stayed in use

The dollar stayed. The British government's travel advice describes US dollars as widely used alongside the Congolese franc in 2026, with ATMs in Kinshasa dispensing them, and Canada's calls the country a cash-based economy in which shopkeepers want dollar notes printed after 2009. Only a fraction of Congolese hold a bank account, by Britannica's account, and most transactions in the informal sector are settled in cash.

Who lives outside the export figures

Measured in dollars, the economy has grown nearly fivefold this century. The World Bank series puts GDP at $19.1 billion in 2000, $7.4 billion in 2001 and $91.0 billion in 2025. GDP per person rose more slowly, from $378 in 2000 to $807 in 2025, because the population more than doubled: the country's record counts 105,789,731 people on 1 January 2023.

The four poverty figures for 2024 and 2025 range from 67% to 81.1% because they draw the line in different places. All of them describe a majority.

Most of that majority farms. About 65% of the population works in subsistence agriculture, and Britannica puts farming, herding, fishing and forestry together at more than three-quarters of the labour force. The World Bank series gives agriculture, forestry and fishing 8.9% of GDP in 2025, down from 32.0% in 2000, while industry, which includes mining, rose from 22.4% to 39.7%. The harvest of 2018 included 29.9 million tons of cassava, 4.7 million tons of plantain, 2 million tons of maize and 1.1 million tons of palm oil. Britannica describes a return to subsistence farming and a collapse of market production as roads and agricultural services decayed after independence.

Recorded unemployment was 4.4% in 2025 in the World Bank series, a figure that says little where, by Wikipedia's account, most jobs are informal. The World Bank names limited job creation in mining as one reason poverty stays high. Food-price inflation reached 173% in 2023. Stunting affects 42% of children under five, a rate the World Bank says has not fallen in twenty years, and the Human Capital Index stood at 0.37 in 2020.

How freight crosses a country with few roads

Kinshasa in the west, Lubumbashi in the south and Kisangani in the north-east are the three economic centres, and no road or railway connects them to each other. In 2015, when the IMF was weighing a $1 billion loan partly to pay for elections planned for December 2016, the country had less than 1,860 miles of paved road.

Freight moves on water and on a railway built for minerals. About 15,000 kilometres of waterway are navigable, with the Congo as the spine, and the port of Kinshasa handles around two million tons of cargo a year, more than triple what the national railway, the SNCC, carries; Wikipedia gives both figures without a year. A river ferry links Kinshasa to Ilebo, where the line to Lubumbashi begins, and that line takes metal and minerals from the south to ports in Angola, or through Zambia to South Africa. The electrified line from Kinshasa to the Atlantic port of Matadi follows a railway built in the 1890s to carry rubber and ivory past the rapids.

A single road can move prices. World Bank-financed roadworks cut the travel time from Lubumbashi to Kasomeno in Katanga from seven days to two hours and lowered the price of staple goods by 60%. The World Bank's next country strategy, whose concept review was completed in July 2026, is organised around development corridors that include Inga and Lobito.

Where the electricity from Inga goes

The first dam at Inga Falls on the lower Congo was completed in 1972 and its second stage in 1982. Hydropower supplies 86% of the country's electricity by Wikipedia's figure, and renewable sources supplied 90.4% in 2021 by the World Bank's. The river's hydroelectric potential is estimated at 100,000 MW, against installed capacity of 2,400 MW in 2010, of which 1,000 MW was working.

The grid shows who the power was built for. Its only interconnected part is the high-voltage line from the Inga dams in Kongo Central to the mining south, which continues to the Zambian border and exports electricity to Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Britannica places the heaviest consumption in the mining areas and in Kinshasa.

Most households sit outside it. In 2022, 21.5% of the population had electricity, and 45% of town dwellers did. More than 70% of households cooked mainly on charcoal in 2025, and almost half of all companies run their own generators against blackouts. How much the capital depends on the dam showed in August 1998, when rebels seized the Inga station that powered Kinshasa within two weeks of the Second Congo War beginning.

How the state pays for itself

The largest mining arrangement of the century traded ore for roads. In 2007 and 2008 the government agreed a resources-for-infrastructure deal with China that created the joint venture Sicomines, majority-owned by the China Railway Engineering Corporation, with Gécamines holding the rest. Sicomines received mining rights in exchange for investing US$3 billion in infrastructure and began production in 2015. A later government investigation found that less than US$1 billion had been spent on infrastructure, and the renegotiated agreement of 2024 raised the commitment to US$7 billion.

Mining revenue has a record of going missing on its way to the budget. In April 2013 anti-corruption groups revealed that the tax authorities could not account for $88 million from the mining sector dating from 2010. In 2013 the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative suspended the country's candidacy for poor reporting and then granted full membership once its accounts improved.

The state's own revenue is thin. The African Development Bank put the tax burden at 13.5% of GDP in 2025, citing a narrow tax base and pervasive informality, and the World Bank series puts tax revenue at 10.7% of GDP in 2022. Security spending in the east widened the budget deficit to 2.6% of GDP in 2025 from 2.1% in 2024. Public debt was 20.2% of GDP in 2025 in the IMF series, against 185.4% in 2001.

Reserves reached US$8.8 billion at the end of March 2026, slightly below three months of imports, and inflation had stayed at 2.5% or below since October 2025. The central bank cut its policy rate from 17.5% to 15% in January 2026 and to 13.5% in April. The country also issued its first Eurobond, which the IMF mission of April and May 2026 welcomed as cheaper than domestic borrowing while asking for transparent use of the proceeds. The African Development Bank estimates the country's financing needs at US$16.7 billion a year through 2030.