Higher education issues in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Managing and running a higher education establishment in the Democratic Republic of Congo is a complex undertaking. Its managerial complexity is due to a number of factors, some of which are mutually contradictory. One of these factors is the disorderly spread of these establishments across almost every sector or local authority (471 at present, plus 264 chiefdoms), all of which are subdivided into 5,908 groupings. The second factor is the fact that all Congolese families are haunted by a spirit of university graduation at any price. Hence the contradiction between parents' desire to educate their children well, on the one hand, and the precariousness of their means, which makes it impossible for them to pay twice the academic fees for their child in the same class (promotion). This puts a lot of pressure on managers.