Headline inflation fell below 8 per cent in July 2025, but the Kinshasa household basket is uneven.

By Kanisa Magazine · July 2025

Congo’s annual inflation reached 7.89 per cent in the BCC’s latest table, down from 11.69 per cent at the end of 2024. The central bank’s real policy rate has climbed to 17.1 per cent as prices cool. A shopper in Kinshasa will not recognise either figure in their purse.

Comparing the INS price index for Kinshasa in the fourth week of July 2025 with the same week a year earlier shows the spread. Transport costs rose 14.3 per cent, restaurants and hotels 11.3 per cent, housing 9.9 per cent and food 8.1 per cent, while communications rose 0.9 per cent and education 0.5 per cent. The average household basket reflects what people can avoid buying, and the items rising fastest are those they cannot.

The gap inside the index

Transport, restaurants and housing are rising at more than twice the pace of clothing and furniture.

The BCC’s weekly digest of 30 July reproduces the INS series by function. In Kinshasa the all-items index stood at 1,839.4 in the fourth week of July, against 1,700.6 a year earlier, which is 8.2 per cent. Beneath that, the arithmetic is uneven. Transport at 2,048.9 against 1,793.4 is the largest rise; restaurants and hotels at 4,483.2 against 4,028.1 come next; and miscellaneous goods and services rose 10.7 per cent. Clothing, furniture and recreation rose between 3 and 4.3 per cent. Health rose 1.8 per cent.

The weekly rate has been steady at about 0.12 per cent for the national index, which annualises to roughly 6 per cent. Disinflation is real, then, but it appears concentrated in imported goods whose prices follow the exchange rate, and the exchange rate has stopped moving.

Why the franc explains some of it and not all

A flat exchange rate has taken goods inflation down, while services stay sticky.

Imported goods follow the dollar closely in a country where, on IMF figures, 92 per cent of deposits are in foreign currency. With the indicative rate moving from CDF 2,866.88 to CDF 2,885.32 across seven months, imported items have had no new cost push. Brent crude, per the BCC’s table, was US$67.86 a barrel on 25 July against US$74.42 at year-end, and the digest’s pump-price table carries no revision after 3 October 2024, so fuel does not explain the transport rise.

What does explain it is harder to see, and the BCC’s table does not say. A plausible reading is that fares, rents and restaurant menus were repriced during the 2023 depreciation, when year-end inflation stood at 23.8 per cent, and operators have been slow to cut back. Services rarely fall in nominal terms, and the same sticky pattern shows in housing and restaurants.

The eastern supply shock

The conflict adds a food risk that the current index does not yet show.

The IMF’s staff report warns of a conflict-related supply shock in the short term, because the economy relies on the affected eastern provinces for some agricultural goods. Food rose 8.1 per cent in Kinshasa, so it is moving in line with the total, but the IMF projects inflation will end the year at 7.8 per cent and reach the BCC’s 7 per cent target only afterwards. The Monetary Policy Committee, meeting on 18 July, also expected 7.8 per cent by December, while the IMF Board credited tight policy with single-digit inflation for the first time in three years.

What a retailer and a payroll manager do with the numbers

Price to the basket your customers actually buy, not to the headline.

A retailer budgeting a 7.9 per cent increase in supplier costs will under-recover if its customers’ transport and housing costs are rising at 10 to 14 per cent, because those customers cut discretionary baskets first. A distributor should model margin on the most exposed categories, not the headline.

Employers face the same arithmetic in wage rounds. Staff in Kinshasa lose more purchasing power to commuting and rent than to food, so a transport allowance indexed to fares will do more for retention than a flat uplift pegged to the national rate. The next sign to watch is the BCC’s September digest for the first week where transport inflation drops below 10 per cent.