Informality, Tax, and Markets in Kinshasa: Everyday Realities and Resistance
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Research in Brief 164
Market taxation is central to local governance and livelihoods in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), yet remains poorly understood. This research explores the experience of taxation in Kinshasa’s markets. The working paper documents how taxation operates in environments where formal state authority intersects with, and is often embedded in, informal institutions and governance structures, and where a plurality of state and non-state actors engage in revenue extraction. Specifically, the study focuses on how market vendors experience taxation, both formal and informal, how they perceive it in terms of fairness and reciprocity, and how these perceptions shape their relationship with the state and govern their willingness to pay.
An important contribution of the study is how these lived realities and responses to taxation vary across different types of markets – those authorised and regulated by the state (what we call formal markets), those unauthorised by the state (what we call informal or pirate markets), and those managed by customary authorities (what we call customary markets). Looking at structural variation in this way helps to shed light on the broader governance implications of taxation in a context where both formal and informal systems coexist.
Yannick Bokasola is Research Director at the Association Congolaise pour la Recherche Académique. He has worked in collaboration with the International Centre for Tax and Development since 2015, leading field research as part of taxation studies including in Kinshasa, the Kivus, and the greater Kasai regions. He served also as Field Coordinator at the Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) unit within the World Bank, where he actively supported the Fragility, Conflict and Violence project portfolio with a regional focus and expertise on the DRC.
Eddy Junior Ngwakoyo is the National Coordinator of the Association Congolaise pour la Recherche Académique. He has long experience working on taxation studies with the International Centre for Tax and Development in the DRC, leading field research in Kinshasa, the Kivus, and the greater Kasai regions.
Gayatri Sahgal is a tax researcher and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of
Pennsylvania. She obtained her PhD from Oxford University in 2023. Her
research focuses on the political economy of taxation in fragile and developing
country contexts. Gayatri’s research is informed by a decade of work as a
research and monitoring evaluation specialist.
Vanessa van den Boogaard is a Research Fellow at the ICTD and a Senior Research Associate at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She completed her PhD thesis on informal revenue generation and statebuilding in Sierra Leone, and has ongoing research on the topic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia. Vanessa leads the ICTD’s new programme on civil society engagement in tax reform and co-leads the research programme on informal taxation.
Citation: Bokasola, Y.; Ngwakoyo, E.J.; Sahgal, G. and van den Boogaard, V. (2025) Informality, Tax, and Markets in Kinshasa: Everyday Realities and Resistance, ICTD Research in Brief 164, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/ICTD.2025.045
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