Official inflation is falling, but services lead the rise and the East has no price index at all.

By Kanisa Magazine · March 2025

Consumer prices in Kinshasa rose 2.17 per cent between the end of December 2024 and the third week of March 2025, and the annual rate fell to 11.0 per cent from 11.8 per cent at the end of January. On the official numbers, pressure on household budgets is easing. The numbers measure the capital, though, and the sharpest price shock of the quarter happened in a city the index does not cover.

For a retailer or an employer, the useful reading is in which items drove the rise, and where the series goes blind.

What the weekly index shows

Prices rose about 0.15 per cent a week, which annualises to under 10 per cent.

The BCC weekly digest reproduces the National Institute of Statistics’ series. For Kinshasa the annual rate was 11.76 per cent at the end of January, 11.28 per cent at the end of February and 11.01 per cent in the third week of March. The national index, which covers more cities, stood at 10.40 per cent in the same week. The BCC’s projection of the year’s pace from the first weeks of 2025 is 9.8 per cent for Kinshasa and 9.9 per cent nationally. Each week’s increase has settled at 0.15 to 0.17 per cent, steadier than the January weeks, which ran from 0.12 to 0.38 per cent.

The fall in the annual rate is partly a base effect. Kinshasa prices had already risen 3.5 per cent by the third week of March 2024, against 2.17 per cent this year. As those faster weeks drop out of the twelve-month window, the annual number falls even while prices keep climbing steadily.

Services and fares lead

Transport, restaurants and rent rose faster than food in Kinshasa.

Between the last week of December and the third week of March the Kinshasa index for transport rose 3.74 per cent, restaurants and hotels 3.24 per cent, housing, water and electricity 2.67 per cent and food 2.26 per cent. Clothing rose 0.9 per cent, and communications, health and education were close to flat. The headline of 2.17 per cent is therefore an average of a stable group of goods and a rising group of local services.

The pump price does not explain transport. The BCC’s fuel table shows that the last revision of the structure of prices was on 3 October 2024, when petrol in the western zone, which includes Kinshasa, was set at CDF 2,990.49 a litre, down from CDF 3,475 in April. Fares, vehicle costs and informal charges are doing the work. Services priced in francs, or in dollars and passed on in francs, move with wages and rents, not with imports, and they are the part of the basket that disinflation reaches last.

The city the index cannot see

In Goma, where banks stayed shut, essential foods were reported up 18 to 160 per cent.

The Kinshasa index is the capital’s weekly price series. It does not measure Goma, where the M23 took control on 27 January. Aid agency ActionAid, quoted by Business Day Ghana, recorded price rises of 18 to 160 per cent for staples such as flour, beans and oil across three markets between 25 and 31 January, and noted that over 90 per cent of the city’s food comes from surrounding areas, which fighting cut off. A month later, with banks closed and cash scarce, Congo Quotidien reported that commissions on mobile-money transfers had risen from about 1 per cent to nearly 10 per cent. That commission is a price too. It raises the cost of every sale paid by phone, and it does not appear in any index.

Reading the signal for business

Budget wages and rents against services inflation, and treat eastern price data as outside the national average.

Three actions follow. An employer in Kinshasa that indexes wages to the headline rate should check whether its staff spend mostly on transport and rent, where prices are rising at about twice the pace of the overall index. A retailer should expect food prices in the capital to stay calm unless transport costs move, because the pump price has been unchanged since October. A company with customers or suppliers in the Kivus should stop using the national figure as a guide and collect its own price quotes weekly. The official signal is that Congo’s inflation is falling. The decision signal is that the pressure has moved to services and to the places the statistics miss.