The headline price signal is improving; the lines that decide a household’s week are not.

By Kanisa Magazine · May 2025

Year-on-year inflation in Congo fell to 9.96 per cent in the last week of April, the first single-digit reading since July 2022 according to the IMF. In the same twenty weeks of 2025 the national transport index rose 7.6 per cent, more than twice the 3.3 per cent rise in all consumer prices. The headline says relief. The detail says that the costs of moving goods and people have not cooled with the rest.

The figures come from the BCC’s digest to 16 May, which reproduces the national price index of the Institut national de la statistique by household function, and from two outside readings of what is happening to food in the east.

What the headline measures

Year-on-year inflation went from 11.7 per cent to 9.5 per cent in five months, with monthly increases of about 0.6 per cent.

The national index shows year-on-year inflation of 11.69 per cent at the end of December, 9.96 per cent in the fourth week of April and 9.52 per cent in the third week of May. Monthly increases were 1.01 per cent in January, 0.71 per cent in February, 0.61 per cent in March and 0.57 per cent in April. The pace is slowing but it is not zero: an annualised 7 per cent or so is still a doubling of prices in a decade.

The IMF’s staff statement of 13 May credits the improvement to exchange-rate stability since mid-2024 together with appropriately tight monetary policy. That is accurate as far as it goes. A stable franc stops imported goods from repricing. It does nothing for the lines driven by distance and supply.

What the detail shows

Between December and mid-May transport rose 7.6 per cent, restaurants and hotels 5.8 per cent, housing costs 4.8 per cent and food 3.2 per cent.

The same table gives the function indices. Transport went from 473.4 to 509.4, restaurants and hotels from 782.08 to 827.56, housing, water and energy from 1,113.7 to 1,167.2 and food from 421.02 to 434.49. Communications moved by under 1 per cent. The all-items index rose 3.3 per cent.

Pump prices do not explain transport. The Ministry of Economy’s price table in the same digest shows petrol in the western zone at CDF 2,990.49 a litre since 3 October 2024, against CDF 3,475 in April of that year, a cut of 14 per cent, and records no change since. Whatever is lifting the transport index is not the pump.

Where the national average hides the east

Staple foods in the conflict zone cost up to 37 per cent more than before the offensive, while the national food index rose 3.2 per cent.

In late March the WFP and FAO counted 28 million Congolese in acute food insecurity, 10.3 million of them in the eastern provinces, and found maize flour, palm oil and cassava flour up to 37 per cent dearer than in December 2024. The national food index rose 3.2 per cent over the same months. Both can be true: the index is a weighted average, and the digest does not make clear how far markets in occupied cities enter the sample.

How the pressure travels

Distance, bank closures and lost flights add a cost to every kilometre, and that cost shows up in transport and in what is sold at the end of it.

Prices in the east were pushed up by closed banks, disrupted trade routes and flights that no longer arrive. Each of those adds a cost between the farm and the plate, and the stable franc cannot remove it. The result is a country with a falling average and a rising dispersion: a Kinshasa shopper sees a calmer market, a Goma shopper does not.

The decision for businesses

Index logistics contracts to the transport component, not the headline, and budget for dispersion across regions.

Distributors and retailers should link transport and delivery clauses to the transport sub-index, which is running at more than twice the headline, and negotiate wage reviews on the basket their staff actually buy. Anyone selling into eastern cities should hold separate price lists. The case for optimism is real, with inflation at its lowest in nearly three years. The case for caution is that the cost of getting goods to customers is the part still rising.