Is slow economic growth originating from the total external debt stock in the Democratic Republic of Congo?

Unsustainable debt reduces productivity of a country. Ten years following its “1960 independence”, the Democratic Republic of Congo adopted policies of resorting to external financing while the world was at the peak of the petro-dollar crisis in the 1970’s. A decade later, in the 1980’s, with the fall in price of raw materials, the Democratic Republic of Congo was trapped in an unsustainable debt burden cycle that saw its economy stagnating with the majority of its population living in extreme poverty with less than US$1.90 a day according to the World Bank. The rise of active armed conflicts in the 1990’s and political unrest during the 2000's added pressures to seek further financial support from creditors, which facilitated corruption and poverty in the process. A country's inability to service its debt has consequences on its population. With empirical evidence, our analysis will be looking at the Congolese standard of living from its independence in 1960 to the historical democratic transfers of power in late 2018 to understand the effects of external debts in the Congolese economic growth.