Evaluation of country programme Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

14 July 2010

As part of DFID’s commitment to rigorously evaluate its country programmes, our work in DRC from 2003 to 2008 was evaluated by a group of independent external consultants in 2009.

Background of DRC

Decades of misrule and two civil wars have devastated the country.  The most recent civil war broke out in DRC in 1997, and lasted until 2003.  As many as five million people are thought to have died unnecessarily since the start of Congo’s civil wars in the late 1990s.  This left the country in a humanitarian and economic crisis. The country also suffers acutely from a lack of infrastructure – for example, only one of DRC’s ten provincial capitals is easily accessible by road from the capital city, Kinshasa. 

This evaluation report was completed prior to the UK 2010 election.
The evaluation aimed to first, provide an account of the performance of the programme over this period; and second, to derive lessons for DFID in DRC and globally.

Performance of the programme

It is extremely difficult to measure the impact and success of the DRC programme due to the lack of poverty data in the DRC.  The lack of poverty data affects the office ability (and the wider donor community) to assess the trends in poverty reduction.

DFID strongly believe in its programme of promoting peace and development in the DRC.   DFID’s programme has massively scaled up in the last few years, moving to larger scale multi donor programmes to maximise their impact.    There has been significant progress in road rehabilitation, mainstreaming HIV/AIDS into its programme and significant improvement in co-ordination of humanitarian responses.

Lessons

These include:

• DFID DRC should do more to mainstream conflict awareness in its programmes, by showcasing examples of conflict mainstreaming at project level.
• DFID DRC should be more explicit in what they see as the right balance in their choice of partners (state and non-state actors) and interventions (short-term and long-term).

Read the full evaluation report and evaluation summary.