Note: The menu shows the 36 African countries where Africare has worked, not the other African countries.

 

DR Congo (Map courtesy of The World Factbook)

DR Congo

REGION: Central Africa
CAPITAL CITY: Kinshasa
POPULATION: 17,872,000
LAND AREA: The size of New Mexico

Hopes have remained high for DR Congo since the Pretoria Accord of December 2002 formally ended nearlyfour decades of internal conflict. In 1965, shortly after independence, Mobutu Sese Seko seized power in a coup d'etat, renamed the country "Zaire" and ruled dictatorially for 32 years (in 1997, after Mobutu's fall, thecountry was renamed the "Democratic Republic of the Congo"). Ethnic strife and civil war, beginning in 1994, compounded the country's suffering. Over the next 18 years, some 3.5 million Congolese died from violence, famine and disease. Today, DR Congo is traversing the long road to recovery — including both infrastructural development and economic revival, especially of the country's globally‐important mining industry.

 

Country Stats

Life expectancy: 47.4 years (USA: 77.9)

Under-5 child mortality: 195/1,000 live births (USA: 7/1,000)

HIV prevalence, ages 15-49: [4.3 - 9.7]% (USA: [0.4 - 1.0]%)

Physicians per 100,000 people: 12 (USA: 256)

People undernourished: 13% (USA: 0%)

People with access to safe drinking water: 84% (USA: 100%)

Adult literacy: 48.7% (USA: 99%)

Annual income, one way to look at it (GDP per capita, PPP US$): $1,648 (USA: $41,890)

Annual income, another way to look at it (GDP per capita): $900 (USA: $41,890)

People living on less than $1 a day: 14.8% (USA: 0%)

(HIV prevalence statistics, UNAIDS. All other statistics, 2007/2008 Human Development Report, UNDP)

           

(Updated, Dec. 18, 2007)