Public Authority and the Governance of Informal Cross-Border Trade in Eastern DRC, 2023

To obtain a free account please register with the UKDA.

This dataset contains qualitative interview data collected as part of the research project Public Authority and the Governance of Informal Cross-Border Trade in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (PAGICBT). The data consist of anonymised semi-structured interviews with small-scale cross-border traders (predominantly women), representatives of cross-border traders’ associations, border and customs officials, and development actors operating along the DRC–Rwanda and DRC–Uganda trade corridors, with fieldwork conducted in Goma (North Kivu) and Bukavu (South Kivu) in 2023. The interviews explore trading practices, legal recognition, collective economic organisation, access to finance, dispute resolution, and the interaction between informal trade practices and regional trade governance, including the COMESA Simplified Trade Regime. The dataset supports socio-legal, law-and-development, and political economy research on informality, legal pluralism, gender, and regional integration in Africa.

This research seeks to highlight the importance of designing good trade policies that take into account informal trade flows, which may allow these trade flows to be brought under the umbrella of regional trade policies. Building on pre-existing research, the project will use the case study of small cross-border traders in Eastern DRC to explore border dynamics in informal cross-border trade, including exogenous and endogenous forces and multiple layers of public authority influencing this trade. Focusing on the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Simplified Trade Regime (STR) – a regional trade policy designed to help small cross-border traders benefit from the preferential tariffs applicable between the COMESA Member States – the proposed research will examine the need for good institutional design of regional trade policies that are better adjusted to the particular circumstances of their targeted beneficiaries, and thus, have a broader coverage of trade agreements.