The Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) has become synonymous with state failure. No country has endured more brutal conflicts, hosted more kleptocratic and corrupt governments, or squandered more resource wealth.
Trapped in a cycle of political uncertainty, economic recession and escalating violence, humanitarian disaster has become a way of life. Yet, a better future is possible.
At the ramshackle Rubaya primary school, in a small town in the lush green hills of North Kivu Province, bordering Rwanda, one gets a glimpse of that possibility. Children sit attentively in overcrowded classrooms, with enthusiasm, ambition and hope lighting up their faces.
Dorothy Gakoti, 13, wants to become a nurse.
“If I succeed in school, I can have a better life with more opportunity — and I can help my family and community,” she said.
Yet, the DR Congo — including North Kivu — remains beset with challenges. Dozens of ethnically based armed groups, called Mai-Mai, prey on local populations.
Sexual violence, often targeting young girls, is as endemic as it is under-reported.
About 4.5 million children are malnourished, almost half of them severely. Less than half of the children who contract potentially deadly diseases, such as pneumonia and malaria, receive treatment.
Making matters worse, about one-quarter of the nation’s school-age children are not receiving any education at all. And those who do go to school face abysmal learning outcomes: Dorothy does not have a book or pencil to her name and she struggles to understand French, the language of instruction.
Yet writing off the DR Congo as a development failure would be a mistake. Since the end of a devastating five-year war in 2003, the country has made marked gains.
While two-thirds of its people still survive on less than US$1.25 per day, poverty and child mortality have fallen, while rates of immunization and school enrollment are rising.
Moreover, the DR Congo has vast untapped economic potential. It possesses more than half of the world’s known reserves of cobalt — a key component in computer chips and lithium-ion batteries — and about 80 percent of the world’s supply of coltan — a heat-resistant metal used in mobile phones and other devices.
The country is also a major producer of copper, gold, tin, tungsten and diamonds. Add to that fertile soils and some of the world’s greatest hydro-power potential, and the DR Congo should be a regional, if not continental, economic powerhouse.
What explains the disconnect between the DR Congo’s vast economic potential and the condition of its children?
For starters, the government has failed to create a tax system to mobilize resources for public investment in health and education. The DR Congo has one of the world’s lowest revenue-to-GDP ratios, with foreign actors and local vested interests effectively pillaging the country.
In his novel Heart of Darkness, set in what is now the DR Congo, Joseph Conrad wrote about what he later described as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.”
Yet, even Conrad would have been aghast at the windfall gains and rock-bottom tax rates that foreign mining investors have secured in the past decade.
The IMF and the World Bank have criticized the excessive generosity of the deals provided for foreign investors in mining, despite having designed and pushed them.
The US Department of the Treasury has accused one foreign investor of gaining US$1.3 billion — more than five times total government health financing in the DR Congo — through “opaque and corrupt” deals.
The lack of government revenue is directly reflected in under-investment in public services. Parents seeking treatment for a malaria-stricken child, or a place for that child in school, must pay from their own pocket — an impossibility for many.
As crowded as the Rubaya primary school’s classrooms are, every child I spoke to there had a sibling not attending school, because their family could not cover the fees — about US$10 per term.
Political turbulence has further disrupted development efforts.
The election that Congolese President Joseph Kabila was supposed to have called in 2016 is now scheduled for December — a delay that has intensified grievances and spurred violence.
Last year, about 2 million people in the DR Congo, half of them in the previously peaceful central province of Kasai, were forced to flee their homes.
The total number of internally displaced people now stands at 4.5 million — second only to Syria in current conflicts — while another 750,000 have fled to neighboring countries.
These displaced people and refugees are living in desperate conditions, without adequate shelter, nutrition and healthcare, and with virtually no access to education.
Boosting productivity and creating jobs for the more than 1.5 million workers entering the labor market each year are essential to put the DR Congo on a different, more hopeful path.
In the DR Congo, education is critical. Each additional year of schooling is associated with a 9 percent increase in income.
Expanded opportunities for learning would thus go a long way toward reducing poverty, especially given that almost half of the DR Congo’s population is under 15 years of age.
However, improved access to education must go hand-in-hand with strategies to combat child malnutrition and poor health.
Education and universal health provision are key to a better future for DR Congo’s children.
Progress would require the next government to take urgent action to build a tax base.
More immediately, unless an effective response to the DR Congo’s escalating humanitarian crisis is mounted this year, the level of suffering is likely to be immense — and not just in the country itself.
As neighboring countries know all too well, what happens in the DR Congo often does not stay in the DR Congo.
An emergency summit planned for this week in Geneva, Switzerland, is an opportunity for donors to stave off the worst, by providing the US$1.7 billion the UN estimates an effective response would require.
That would require donors to abandon their short-sighted and wrong-headed perceptions of the DR Congo as a lost cause and instead help the country build the future that its children deserve.
Kevin Watkins is the chief executive of Save the Children UK.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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