Casualty recording in the Democratic Republic of Congo
The rate of identification and documentation of casualties of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo is extremely low, due to a combination of factors. Conflict deaths in DRC span more than three decades, amount to several million individuals, and have occurred across vast and hard-to-access regions. Armed violence is ongoing and multiple states, state-backed groups, and non-state armed groups have participated in the conflict at different times, making it both difficult and dangerous to identify perpetrators. Despite vast mineral wealth, DRC ranks among the Least Developed Countries in the World Bank index and ranked 164 out of 174 countries on the Human Capital Index. Public services are under-resourced and poverty is endemic. Much of the population in live in remote areas, at a significant distance from state institutions including medical facilities. Each of these factors represents a significant obstacle to accurate and comprehensive recording of casualties.
There is no state-led initiative mandated specifically to document conflict casualties in DRC. Like other public services, DRC’s health and death care system has been badly affected by protracted armed conflict, political instability, and inadequate infrastructure. The civil registration (births and deaths) system in DRC is weak. Financial and human resources are severely limited and primarily directed at urgent humanitarian needs, while public access to services which exist is highly variable by location and income level. In regions with an equatorial climate and where there are no surfaced roads, access to medical facilities or civil registration offices is very limited and can take between eight hours to two days to reach by foot. Families must pay to receive a copy of a birth or death certificate, which is an obstacle to those on low incomes. These factors result in low levels of birth and death registration, which makes recording and identifying casualties more difficult.
The chronic insecurity across large regions of eastern Congo has led to massive population movement over decades, with more than seven million people displaced. During outbreaks of violence, victims’ families and other witnesses may be forced to flee rapidly. This makes it difficult to locate and interview witnesses to gather information about the dead. Survivors may not report deaths or share information about specific incidents, especially with unknown (external) actors, due to the ongoing risk of reprisals.
International documentation efforts
Humanitarian and some military actors (for example, peacekeeping forces) track patterns of killings and statistical trends, to help target their interventions effectively. They may record demographic information on victims to help analysts interpret the broader picture, but do not typically collect detailed information on individuals. This tracking of fatalities is for internal use, sometimes shared with other agencies, but not for public access.
Although some organisations record and store identifying information about individual casualties, this information is typically kept strictly confidential. This is because of the risk of retaliation against witnesses and victims’ families. The ongoing nature of the conflict means that there is a constant risk of further violence.
Over the past three decades of conflict, human rights advocacy groups and UN fact-finding missions have documented fatalities in multiple reports and investigations. Among these, the single most comprehensive was the 2010 UN Mapping Report, which documented 617 incidents of gross human rights violations between 1993 and 2003. The team of report authors interviewed more than 1,200 witnesses and received lists of names of thousands of victims.
However, the focus of these investigative reports is to illustrate systemic abuses through emblematic cases, not to document as many cases as possible. Similarly, detailed information on victims of specific incidents has been presented in war crimes cases prosecuted at the International Criminal Court, such as The Prosecutor v. Germain Katanga and The Prosecutor v. Bosco Ntaganda. This means that detailed information on individual victims exists, verified to a high standard, but only in a very limited number of instances.
The United Nations Joint Human Rights Office (UNJHRO) is the human rights component of the UN mission in DRC. It publishes routine monthly and thematic public reports on human rights issues across the country, which include statistical data on casualties. The reports do not identify individuals.
Civil society and the Genocost
There is a strong presence of humanitarian NGOs across DRC, many of which track information on fatal incidents. However, there is no comprehensive initiative to document all casualties.
In 2022, as a result of campaigning by Congolese civil society groups in Congo and the diaspora, 2 August was officially adopted as a national commemoration day for all victims of the conflicts in Congo, known as the ‘Genocost’. A national fund for reparations was established the same year for victims of conflict-related sexual violence and other crimes against humanity, and a national Genocost Memorial was inaugurated in Kinshasa in 2025.
Information on individual casualties
Sources of information about people killed in the armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo:
The Crisis Tracker is a geospatial database and reporting project that tracks conflict-related incidents, including casualties, in the remote region encompassing Bas Uele and Haut Uele provinces in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as well as the Haut Mbomou, Mbomou, and Haute Kotto prefectures in the Central African Republic.
The Crisis Tracker project exists to overcome the current deficit of relevant and timely data about the impact of armed conflict on vulnerable civilian populations. Its data is drawn primarily from community-based early warning systems across 120 communities. In addition to the online map, the Crisis Tracker team also publishes regular security briefs.
For the security of survivors and witnesses, Crisis Tracker does not normally publish identifying details for individuals.
VPGL is an independent, Congolese human rights organisation, established in 2011. VPGL documents human rights violations in areas affected by armed conflict, particularly in North and South Kivu regions. Its work is aimed at ensuring recognition for victims and better protection for civilians, while making the human impact of the conflict more visible.
The organisation gathers and verifies information about casualties through a wide network of volunteers, based within affected local communities. VPGL has been recording fatalities since 2019, and as of 2026 has over 3,000 individual victims documented in its database.
