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DR Congo has failed to use $8.3 billion committed by global development partners for public projects due to administrative delays and poor management, a failure its president said is “undermining the state’s credibility” as it seeks to attract more foreign capital.
Only 24% of an active portfolio worth more than $10.7 billion had been paid out, cabinet meeting minutes released earlier this month showed. DR Congo President Félix Tshisekedi told ministers this reflected “a weak capacity to turn mobilized financing into actual investment.” The state financial watchdog attributed the disbursement problems to administrative delays, weak project management, and late counterpart funding from the Congolese government.
Flory Mapamboli, a Congolese lawmaker and former treasury adviser to the finance minister, said the conditions had already been met for some financing, but the money was still not being disbursed. “We don’t know how to use the money,” he told Semafor. “That is precisely the problem of absorption capacity. And when we fail to absorb the money, our credibility is damaged.”
The findings come at a sensitive moment for DR Congo. Its growing importance to global critical-mineral supply chains is drawing ambitious infrastructure bets from foreign governments and lenders such as the World Bank.
The US is backing high-profile projects including the Lobito Corridor and the Dilolo-Sakania railway to open new routes linking the country’s mining belt to global markets. “Our country has so much potential that even when donors come and hit a wall, they still come back,” Gisèle Ngoya, a project-management expert who spent more than 15 years at COFED, a finance ministry unit that manages EU-funded development projects in DR Congo, told Semafor. “And the people in power have understood that.”
Tshisekedi has ordered Prime Minister Judith Suminwa to make improving disbursement rates for externally financed projects “a priority of government action,” the minutes said, and directed the finance, budget, and planning ministries to secure counterpart funding and simplify procedures. We “need to establish a culture of execution and results so that every financing commitment produces a tangible impact on people’s living conditions,” he said.
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Concerns over DR Congo’s ability to turn committed financing into actual investment come on top of growing criticism over other delays in disbursing proceeds. For instance, the delays in disbursing the $1.25 billion the government raised in its debut Eurobond in April, part of Kinshasa’s effort to widen its sources of capital, as the projects meant to receive the money were not ready.
That criticism prompted the finance ministry to publish an update earlier this month showing that about $137 million had already been disbursed to three projects. The ministry said the government “will absorb this year the full amount planned for project financing” from the Eurobond, as technical and contractual work continued on other projects.
Lawmaker Mapamboli said the Eurobond controversy underscored DR Congo’s challenges in managing projects and absorbing financing. “We did not have, from the outset, the list of projects to finance, the amounts for each project and the disbursement schedules,” he told Semafor. “If you mobilize all the money now, that money will sit there because you don’t pay contractors everything on the first day.”
Yet DR Congo still needs far more capital for development. In April the government estimated it needed almost $95 billion — mostly for infrastructure projects — through 2028, but expected to raise just $50.5 billion, leaving a $44.2 billion funding gap. “Our infrastructure deficit is enormous,” Mapamboli said. “Leaving a project unexecuted is a luxury we cannot afford in Congo.”
Step Back
DR Congo is not alone in failing to disburse committed development funding from international partners. Across sub-Saharan Africa, a Semafor analysis of World Bank data found $32.6 billion in credits and grants approved before 2024 still undisbursed at the end of July, spread across 525 projects, with DR Congo accounting for $2.24 billion of those funds.
“Effective implementation, visible in disbursements and measurable improvements in people’s lives, is the difference between aspiration and impact,” Albert Zeufack, the World Bank’s division director covering DR Congo, wrote in March about efforts to strengthen project execution in the country.
Kojo Busia, a former senior official at the UN Economic Commission for Africa, told Semafor the responsibility for disbursing funds also fell on international development partners. “Development partners must build the recipient government’s capacity to budget as well as manage these projects. More cynically, partners must not commit to projects [where] counterparts have no capacity to draw on funds [or] implement” projects.
The View From Cameroon
At the end of March, Cameroon had 5.04 trillion CFA francs, equivalent to about $8.8 billion, in committed but undisbursed external financing, according to the country’s public debt agency. Last month, a joint government-African Development Bank review of the bank’s active portfolio in Cameroon identified procurement delays, slow mobilization of counterpart funds, and delays in obtaining the bank’s no-objection approvals among the main obstacles slowing execution of AfDB-funded projects.
Notable
- Africa faces an annual development financing gap of about $400 billion, the African Development Bank estimates.