Private Higher Education in a Post-Abdication State: (In)Governance and Inequality in the Democratic Republic of Congo

The chapter on the Democratic Republic of Congo shows the difficulty of understanding educationnal inequalities and the role of private higher education in their production in a failed country characterised by porosity between the public and private sectors, lack of robustness of data on higher education, absence of public funding and regulation of higher education and informal economy. But il shows also how higher education survive since three decades by emphasizing the heavy price of this survival: very low quality of training, absence of research, reign of arbitrariness and the race for a diploma by any means that the majority of young people … don’t have. The analysis also highlights four non-exclusive types of development logic for private institutions: land-based, social, or political; faith-based, national or local; entrepreneurial; and electoral clientelism. These approaches illustrate the different modes of student recruitment that are at the root of certain educational and social inequalities. They suggest that socio-educational inequalities are may be on the verge of a profound worsening. Paradoxically, the private sector is merely an offshoot of academic and corporatist monopolies established in the shadow of the failed state. With the exception of a few elitist denominational institutions, the private sector offers no alternative in terms of educational justice, training or social values.