The World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Brief, released on 9 October 2026, describes a gap between strong growth and household welfare in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Real gross domestic product grew 5.7% in 2025, and the Bank projects growth to remain above 5% through 2028. These figures describe total economic output. They do not show that household incomes are rising at the same pace or that poverty will fall quickly.

The brief’s central structural finding is that growth rests on a narrow employment base. Extractive industries generate more than 36% of GDP and 99% of exports, but account for only 2.5% of jobs. Mining production and exports can therefore lift foreign earnings and aggregate output without creating work at the same scale for the wider population seeking employment. These shares describe the sector’s weight; they do not measure the profitability or tax contribution of each mine.

Household figures also need to be read alongside the methods behind them. The Bank reports that 69.1% of the population lived below the national poverty line in the 2024 ECVM survey. At the international line of $3 a day, the 2020 survey recorded 85.3%; the brief estimates a rate of about 80.5% for 2026. These are not observations from the same year. The 2026 figure is an estimate, and changes in survey design limit direct comparisons across the series.

The labor-market profile sharpens the question of how growth might become more inclusive. Agriculture employs 58.4% of workers, while only 26.1% are in wage employment. Even among wage earners, 65.8% remain below the national poverty line. The figures indicate that having a job does not by itself guarantee adequate income or security. The Bank identifies access to markets and infrastructure, transport costs, finance and quality services as constraints on private-sector development and investment in human capital.

The policy direction set out in the brief is to preserve macroeconomic stability while expanding productive employment, improving human capital and raising productivity in sectors where many poor households work. The international poverty rate’s 2020 observation, 2026 estimate and 2024 national measure use different periods and methods; they should not be treated as one uninterrupted series. This report does not present the growth forecast as an achieved outcome or sector shares as proof of job-creation capacity.