DRC – Countrywide Displacement Overview (October 2023)

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has a complex internal displacement situation with a diverse set of drivers and impacts. In the country’s eastern provinces, armed conflict and insecurity have long been the primary drivers of the large-scale protracted displacement that the region experiences. This has been compounded, since mid-2022, by a resurgence in armed group activity in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri leading to internal unrest, regional instability, and widespread acute displacement. On top of the large-scale humanitarian crisis in the east of the country, other regions of the DRC have experienced conflict, insecurity, and disasters such as floods and landslides. A complete understanding of the displacement situation across the entire DRC is vital to inform both near-term humanitarian assistance, as well as engaging a wider array of stakeholders involved in long-term programming. The Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) is IOM’s system for collecting and analysing primary data concerning population movement and has been deployed in over 90 humanitarian operations globally. DTM has conducted large-scale population mobility monitoring in the country’s eastern part since 2018. This report presents the first country level displacement overview produced by DTM in the DRC and combines data from conventional Mobility Tracking (MT) in the country’s four east provinces (conducted between August and September 2023) as well as from a new exercise launched, MT Light, covering the remaining 22 provinces for which data was collected in May and June 2023.

At a national level, DTM identified 6,947,295 individual internally displaced persons (IDPs), primarily concentrated in the four eastern provinces of North Kivu (2,300,163 individuals), Ituri (1,630,535), South Kivu (1,356,376), and Tanganyika (350,462) as well as the province/city of Kinshasa in the west of the country (392,281). These five provinces alone account for the considerable majority (87%) of current displacement in the DRC. The remaining 21 provinces account for 13 per cent of the total number of IDPs in the country (917,478 individuals).