An economy dominated by the informal sector
Titled “The Missing Link: From Enterprise Growth to Job Creation,” the report paints a worrying picture of the structure of the Congolese economic fabric. According to the Bretton Woods institution, extractive industries account for about 36.6% of gross domestic product (GDP), but generate only 2.5% of jobs. This imbalance illustrates the economy’s difficulty in spreading the benefits of mining growth to other sectors of activity.
At the same time, the informal sector accounts for nearly 90% of employment and more than 99% of enterprises. In the formal sector, only about 3% of enterprises employ at least 100 workers. For the World Bank, this weak presence of medium-sized enterprises limits the expansion of wage employment and slows the structural transformation of the economy.
Micro and small enterprises are nonetheless a pillar of formal employment. They account for nearly three quarters of it and contribute to about 70% of net formal job creation. However, between 2021 and 2024, nearly half of formal enterprises and about 70% of formal microenterprises created no full-time jobs.
Financing and administrative constraints in question
The report identifies several obstacles that prevent enterprises from crossing the growth threshold. These include limited access to financing, infrastructure deficits, high logistics costs, corruption and administrative burdens.
Credit to the private sector represents about 11% of GDP in the DRC, compared with an average of 21% in sub-Saharan Africa. SMEs, for their part, receive less than 20% of bank loans. Another difficulty: business leaders devote an average of 20% of their time to regulatory requirements, more than double the regional average.
Under these conditions, enterprises have limited room to invest, improve their productivity and hire new workers.
Reforms to turn growth into jobs
Faced with these challenges, the World Bank advocates reforms aimed at improving the business climate, facilitating SME access to financing, strengthening infrastructure and reducing administrative and tax constraints.
The projections put forward in the report nevertheless show the potential of these changes. Improving certain parameters of the business environment could increase output per worker by 10 to 40%. Reforms targeting SMEs could also make it possible to generate between 3,500 and 12,000 additional formal jobs over three years among existing enterprises.
Beyond SMEs, the institution recommends strengthening links between large mining operations and domestic suppliers in order to increase the participation of Congolese enterprises in the extractive sector’s value chains.
For a country whose growth remains heavily dependent on mining, the challenge now is to better redistribute the effects of this wealth within the national economy. Building a fabric of productive enterprises, capable of growing and hiring, thus appears to be an essential condition for turning economic growth into a genuine lever for development and improved living conditions.
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