With or Against the Flow: Water Governance in Goma, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2019-2020

The project examines households’ daily management, financial governance, access to water and other basic social services in the city of Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It uses an innovative mix of social network research, ethnography and governance diaries to gain in-depth data to reveal how residents navigate public authority in an insecure environment and cope with unforeseen shocks. The data is collected every two weeks by five Congolese researchers over a period of eleven months. Project leads will analyse the data using complementary qualitative and quantitative approaches, yielding a range of outputs from co-authored academic articles to policy briefs and blogs written by researchers. A paper examining the political economy of water services in Goma will also be researched and written in mid-2019. This anonymised data concerns the household financial diaries of 23 households in three neighbourhoods of Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) between February 2019 and March 2020. Our research centred on man- and woman-headed households of low and middle socioeconomic strata. It is designed to be used alongside ethnographic interview and social network data which was also collected but is not in this repository due to sensitivities.