Paper short abstract:

In 2012 a public-private partnership was designed by facilitating salary payment via individual bank accounts. We show how the success of this policy was quite unevenly spread over the DRC territory and accentuated existing urban/rural disparities.

Paper long abstract:

Congolese teachers, like all public employees, used to receive their payments through networks of state intermediaries, until, in 2012 a public-private partnership was designed to improve payment modalities by facilitating payments via individual bank accounts.

To date, the Kabila government considers this "bancarisation" of public servants' salaries as one of its biggest successes, but this claim needs further scrutiny. Instead of focusing on "implementation gaps" and "reform failure", we start from the more intriguing question "What do these schemes do for different groups of people ?" (Murray Li, 2005). Murray Li focuses on the 'agency' of the "territory" and the political economy of generating and diffusing knowledge and information. (links with infrastructural power). Following her line of reasoning, the success of bancarisation depends in turn on some less visible but no less real technologies of governance that have undergirded real statehood. It goes without saying that these technologies are spread unevenly over the territory of the DRC, with the obvious implication that the bancarisation might sharpen the differences between the working circumstances of the urban and the rural teachers even more, and negatively effect precisely the least 'literate' regions.

In our research, we combine national-level and local-level data to add empirical flesh to these conceptual bones. Interviews have been carried out in Kinshasa, Lubumbashi and the rural territories of Haut-Katanga, at different periods during 2014-2016. This information is complemented with administrative documents and data. (this paper has been developed in co-operation with Stylianos Moshonas)

Paper Download (858 KB)