On Thursday, September 29, 2022, the Congolese Ministry of Finance, in collaboration with the Bloomfield Rating Agency, organized the first edition of the DRC Country Risk Conference.
During this conference, the Bloomfield Agency released its report on the rating of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This rating agency assigned the Democratic Republic of Congo an overall rating of 5.1. This effectively classifies the DRC as a “moderate risk country.”
Several public and private sector officials participated in this event. These included the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the Interior, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of the Budget, the Governor of the Central Bank of Congo (BCC), the President of the Federation of Congolese Enterprises (FEC), public officials, guests from other sectors, certain members of the diplomatic corps, and the CEOs of the country’s main banks.
Speaking during the second panel, dedicated to the business environment, Mr. Mustafa Rawji, Managing Director of Rawbank, took the opportunity to discuss the characteristics of the DRC’s investment risk map. “The big question is how to create a framework to transform SMEs into formal economic units and encourage them to benefit from banking services. We firmly believe that the transformation of this country will depend on SMEs. The large companies that exist today will exist in ten years, but their business model will remain the same,” he said. 
As for the question of what levers the banking sector can use to increase access to financing for economic operators, he stated that Rawbank is committed to a very dynamic strategy and has set itself the goal of financing 20,000 SMEs by 2025.
