The Democratic Republic of Congo has launched its first oil and gas data bank. The facility was inaugurated on July 2, 2026, in Kinshasa by Minister of State and Minister of Hydrocarbons Acacia Bandubola Mbongo.

The infrastructure includes three servers dedicated to the upstream oil sector, with a combined storage capacity of 15,000 gigabytes, as well as one server for the downstream oil sector. A backup system is also expected to preserve and secure the state’s strategic data.

According to the Ministry of Hydrocarbons, the data bank will centralize, secure and better preserve strategic information related to the country’s oil and gas sector. It is intended to modernize the management of government technical data, particularly information related to hydrocarbon exploration, geological analysis and resource evaluation.

The initiative comes as the DRC seeks to better leverage its oil and gas potential. In the petroleum sector, the availability of reliable, centralized and accessible data is critical to attracting investors, preparing licensing rounds, evaluating sedimentary basins and strengthening the state’s negotiating capacity.

Data Yet to Be Consolidated

For Ricky Mualaba Kalenga, an adviser at the Ministry of Hydrocarbons, the inauguration is only the beginning.

“This inauguration is not an end in itself. It marks the beginning of a more ambitious process that will continue with the digitalization, vectorization, integration and gradual enrichment of all historical data from the hydrocarbons sector,” he said during the ceremony.

The distinction is important. The opening of the data bank does not mean that all of the sector’s historical information has already been digitized, integrated and made readily accessible. Instead, it marks the start of a gradual process to consolidate existing archives and technical data.

The ministry also acknowledged that, for many years, the hydrocarbons sector lacked a modern, secure and centralized system for preserving and managing petroleum data. The new infrastructure is intended to address that longstanding gap.

It also reflects recent cooperation between the DRC and Algeria. On May 30, 2026, Kinshasa and Algiers signed a memorandum of understanding in the hydrocarbons sector, including cooperation on modernizing oil data management and utilization. However, in announcing the inauguration, the ministry did not specify whether the data bank opened in Kinshasa is a direct outcome of that bilateral agreement.

Boaz Kabeya