In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), public administration enters a new era with a digital civil servant registry

The exact number of civil servants in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is unknown, and a consolidated database across all ministries does not exist. Can you imagine trying to run a whole country without knowing the number of civil servants in your workforce?

We are excited to share the progress that the DRC has achieved in response to this challenge, with technical assistance from our team under the World Bank-supported project Enhancing Collection of Revenue and Expenditure Management – ENCORE.

Before going into detail, it is important to reflect on why this is important. The DRC is the largest country by surface area in Sub-Saharan Africa and has a population of almost 100 million and the third largest number of poor in the world. Making progress on the World Bank’s goal of reducing poverty worldwide very much depends on reducing poverty in the DRC. However, the country’s long history of conflict, political turmoil, and authoritarian rule have led to weak institutions and deep-rooted governance challenges, which stifled development. A symptom of this problem is also a weak and unaffordable bureaucracy.

In early 2025, DRC launched the first clean and digital directory of its civil servants, working in the central government and the province of Kinshasa. The ceremony was chaired by the Prime Minister, Her Excellency Judith Suminwa, and the Vice-Primer Minister, Minister of the Civil Service, His Excellency Jean-Pierre Lihau. At this event, the authorities paid homage to the Congolese staff who worked tirelessly, crossing dense forests on motorcycles and wide rivers on pirogues, to reach one-by-one civil servants even in the most remote parts of the country, and hand them a brand-new biometric identification card.

The goal of the reform, supported by the World Bank and our team and implemented by the Ministry of Civil Service and the Steering Committee for Public Finance Reform (COREF for its acronym in French), is to better manage the state’s workforce and wage bill. This is significant, since more than 40% of DRC’s spending goes to staff salaries. The reform will also put an end to the problem of ghost workers, employees listed on the payroll that do not actually work for the Government, because they are either fictitious or they are no longer employed. This problem has long undermined DRC’s public administration.

The reform process started with the creation of a common file (FRAP for its acronym in French) where employee data from various government agencies was consolidated. The Ministry cleaned and validated data and issued biometric identification cards to over 118,000 civil servants across the country’s 26 provinces. The next phase of this reform will include updating the directory yearly and more digitization, by integrating human resource data and payroll management (called SIGRH-Paie), a coordinated reform effort with the Ministry of Budget. This is expected to result in savings for the government, which can be directed to supporting more reforms and development programs.

The ENCORE Project was designed by incorporating lessons learned in the implementation of governance projects in Congo over two decades. One of the lessons showed that success was not linear, and it was thus critical to provide incentives to maintain momentum for difficult policy reforms, such as the cleaning up and the digitalization of the civil servants database. As a result, our team designed the project by incorporating, for the first time in the DRC portfolio, performance-based conditions, which allowed the government to receive payment upon achievement of concrete results.

Despite enormous challenges in a fragile context, including the recent escalation of the security situation in the eastern part of the country, DRC remains committed to modernize its public sector. It now has another important result to show. In the words of the Vice-Prime Minister Lihau, achieving such progress “is a historic moment made possible due to the Government’s close partnership with the World Bank.”

What is next for DRC’s civil service agenda? The authorities plan to focus future efforts on enumeration of more categories of government employees, such as teachers, health workers, police and military, judges and magistrates, who are currently managed under separate files. This is difficult but possible, because the results we are already seeing have created a virtuous cycle and provided authorities momentum to stay the course on an ambitious path. The World Bank and our team is committed to continue and support these efforts.