Stylianos Moshonas, Tom De Herdt and Kristof Titeca explore the challenges facing the DR Congo civil service.
The Congolese administration in its current state has long been pointed to as a major impediment to Congo’s ambition to achieve developmental outcomes: threadbare on the service delivery front, inefficient, excessive in urban settings, and corrupt – indeed indicative of the state’s predatory nature. In a sense, the civil service has come a long way: the outbreak of war in the 1990s came atop decades of economic crisis, structural adjustment, and state decline, and meant that in 2001 – when donors re-engaged with the country after ten years of absence – administrative capacity was very emaciated. Since then, though, a wide array of (mostly donor-promoted) structural reforms have been unrolled in the DRC.
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