This page was constructed in the framework of a research on “power, poverty and politics”, coordinated by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC), and implemented by the Institute of Development Policy.
The ability to access reliable data is a recurrent challenge among researchers and partners involved in poverty research on the DRC. Survey information mostly target policy makers where reports regularly refer to secondary data references as opposed to primary sources which are not readily accessible.
When examined up close, there are also key methodological challenges pertaining to sampling, variations in the provincial demographic weights and in the applied urbanisation rates within provinces; diverse alignments across surveys relating to demographic weights estimations, and deflator problems. It is therefore essential for survey results in the DRC to not be taken at face value.
On September 28-29th 2017, we held a seminar in Kinshasa, gathering academic researchers from the Congo who are currently engaged in poverty research within various universities across the country, as well as development partners involved in the funding or implementation of national household surveys in the DRC. This seminar was an outcome component of the ongoing work on livelihoods in the DRC aiming to conduct analysis and gain in-depth knowledge on how the economic growth realised in the last decade was experienced throughout the country and across differing layers of the society. One of the conclusions of the September workshop was also to set up a webpage, so to increase the public knowledge of different livelihoods datasets as well as research results based on these datasets.