Internal Migration to Kinshasa 1970-2007: Investigating migrant characteristics in times of insecurity and economic crises

It is not clear how economic crises or conflict influence the process of internal migration and urbanization. This paper uses data from the MAFE-Congo dataset to investigate internal migration to Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), by examining the migration histories of 389 lifetime migrants to the city. The analysis considers whether most migration was rural-to-urban and if recent decades of civil conflict and economic crises in the DRC coincided with higher levels of in-migration to Kinshasa. Although the data shows an increase in the number of moves during heightened periods of conflict towards the end of the 1990s, this is not found to be an overall trend when cohort and age patterns of migration are accounted for. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of migrants to Kinshasa were born in other cities, not in rural areas as might be expected given DRC’s high rates of rural-to-urban migration, and most migrants were born in the provinces adjacent to Kinshasa. This implies that patterns of migration to Kinshasa reflect geographic proximity and urban-to-urban migration patterns more than direct efforts to flee the impacts of conflict, which in turn suggests that the end of the conflict in the DRC may not lead to decreases in migration to Kinshasa.