Congo’s economy maintained a moderate expansion in 2024, with real GDP growth of 2.6%, lifting real income per capita for the first time since 2016. However, this improvement has not yet translated into a meaningful reduction in the poverty rate. Agriculture expanded thanks to local content policies promoting domestic farm inputs for agro-food industries, while manufacturing benefited from higher exports due to higher demand from regional markets. Yet oil production fell due to technical issues and lower prices, highlighting the fragility of growth tied to hydrocarbons and the urgent need for diversification.
This nascent diversification has not yet translated into broad-based employment. Non-oil firms posted robust average revenue growth of 11%, but jobs expanded by just 3%. The weak employment elasticity reflects structural challenges related to a weak business environment, particularly unreliable electricity and limited access to finance—that elevate costs, suppress firm growth, and curb job creation.
On the fiscal front, the state improved revenue mobilization despite lower oil receipts. Total revenues rose to 25.1% of GDP in 2024 (compared to 24.3 % in 2023), supported by non-oil tax gains, tighter enforcement (including on customs and VAT for fuel imports), higher excises, and the first inflows from gas sales. However, expenditure climbed to 22.4% of GDP (up from 20.7 % in 2023), driven by higher domestic interest payments and social transfers, narrowing the budget surplus.
Although Congo’s debt is declining, rising liquidity risks call for stronger debt and cash management. The debt-to-GDP ratio fell from 103.6% in 2020 to 93.6% in 2024, but the domestic share increased, heightening refinancing and liquidity pressures. Debt service on the regional market absorbed about half of budget revenues by end-2024, leading to arrears, spending cuts, and the government’s launch of a debt reprofiling plan (PNOT).
Looking ahead, growth is projected at 2.8% in 2025, with a modest recovery over 2026–2027. An uncertain global environment, tighter financial conditions, and a secular decline in oil demand and prices will test fiscal and external resilience. Sustaining a 3% budget surplus will require substantive spending consolidation alongside continued non-oil revenue gains. Debt is expected to fall gradually, conditional on disciplined borrowing and improved cash and risk management.
While these short-term trends are important, it is equally essential to preserve and diversify Congo’s national wealth in the long-term - how its people, nature, and infrastructure support lasting progress. Congo’s total wealth nearly doubled from 1995 to 2020, anchored in human (39%) and natural capital (38%), with produced capital (23%) boosted by substantial investment during the oil-boom period. But wealth per capita has declined due to insufficient investment in human capital, natural capital degradation, combined with rapid population growth.
Forests, which cover more than 69% of the country, store around 16 billion tons of carbon and provide essential ecosystem services. Yet these forests are under threat: the country lost 1.9% of its forest cover between 2000 and 2020, and biodiversity has declined. Strengthening forest governance, implementing digital traceability for forest products, increasing local wood processing, and building capacity to access carbon markets could create jobs, unlock climate financing and promote conservation.
Finally, human capital remains central to long-term prosperity. Health and education spending has fluctuated with oil cycles, limiting improvement in learning and health outcomes and overall productivity. Stabilizing and prioritizing social spending, improving education quality, and expanding access to education (including TVET aligned to labor demand) are pivotal to lifting resilience, reducing poverty, and ensuring that non-oil growth translates into better livelihoods.
Key recommendations:
- Strengthen fiscal sustainability and debt governance by boosting non-oil revenue mobilization, rationalizing non-essential spending, enhancing the capacity of the Congolese Amortization Fund, improving SOE debt transparency.
- Promote private sector participation in infrastructure through well-structured PPPs to expand financing and delivery capacity.
- Prioritize human capital by increasing and better targeting budgets for health and education, setting long-term investment strategies, engaging the private sector, and channeling resources efficiently to technical vocational education and training (TVET) and higher education aligned with labor market needs.
- Improve management of non-renewable resources by updating geological data and legal frameworks to attract mining investment, developing domestic and regional gas markets, regaining the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) membership, and adopting transparent fiscal and oversight frameworks for oil and gas.
- Maximize renewable natural capital by strengthening forest and land governance (including digital traceability), deploying incentives (e.g., bonus–malus) for sustainable practices, raising agricultural productivity, promoting ecotourism, expanding rural energy access, and building institutional/legal readiness for carbon markets and climate finance.
- International support is essential to complement Congo’s efforts to preserve its forests, notably through fair compensation mechanisms and strengthened REDD+ frameworks, climate financing and enhanced cooperation, as well as innovative nature-based financing instruments (for example, sustainability-linked bonds).