Surge in Gender Violence 2025
The room fell silent on 12 December in Brazzaville’s Plateaux District Hall when Kaani Assistance unfurled the results of its November fieldwork. The non-governmental organisation’s report, Visibiliser et documenter les violences faites aux femmes en République du Congo, registers a marked rise in gender-based violence (GBV) cases in 2025 compared with the preceding two years. According to the research team, which cross-checked incident reports from the judicial police, public hospitals and the National Programme to Combat Gender-Based Violence, the upward curve is no statistical fluke but a persistent trend demanding urgent policy attention.
While the Congo has not been singled out by the latest UN Women regional barometer, the Kaani figures echo wider Central African dynamics. The Economic Commission for Africa notes that economic fragility, especially after successive oil price shocks, has correlated with heightened domestic tensions in several CEMAC member states. “What we are seeing is not an isolated spike; it is part of a structural pattern that links economic hardship to household-level violence,” explains Kaani’s lead researcher, sociologist Luce Bénédicte Gangoue.
In concrete terms, the report documents a 32 percent rise in hospital-recorded assault injuries between January and October 2025, a jump corroborated by Brazzaville’s central police statistics. Although official numbers remain incomplete, Kaani’s triangulated method suggests that for every case reported, at least four go unrecorded.
Field Findings Highlight Care Gaps
Beyond the headline numbers, the study lays bare persistent deficiencies in survivor support. Teams led by Gangoue and community outreach officer Franche Orchidée Malanda visited eleven police stations and seven health facilities across Brazzaville and the neighbouring Pool Department. Everywhere they encountered staff goodwill tempered by material constraints: depleted post-rape treatment kits, shortages of emergency contraception and a lingering absence of trauma counselling services.
A senior nurse at Talangaï General Hospital, requesting anonymity, confirmed that stock-outs are recurrent. “We sometimes exhaust our forfait of medical evidence kits by the twentieth of the month,” she lamented. On the police side, procedural bottlenecks continue to delay forensic examinations, reducing the evidentiary value of complaints and discouraging survivors from pursuing justice.
Yet the report also highlights positive experiments. Two pilot ‘listening rooms’ established within district police units with support from the Ministry of the Promotion of Women and UNICEF have seen complaint follow-through rates double in six months. Kaani argues that scaling such integrated models could dramatically improve survivor experience without imposing unaffordable costs.
Economic Stress and Social Norms
Why is violence intensifying just as public campaigns against GBV multiply? The NGO’s analysts point to a confluence of socio-economic pressures. First, household purchasing power has eroded under the combined weight of pandemic recovery and higher import bills, factors that the Bank of Central African States acknowledges in its 2024-2025 outlook. Second, gender inequality remains entrenched in customary law and certain inheritance practices, limiting women’s bargaining power within families.
Community focus groups convened in Makélékélé revealed how social expectations still normalise ‘disciplinary’ violence. Participants described bride-price obligations that saddle young couples with debt and magnify conflict. Kaani’s Malanda observes that such norms, “create a permissive environment where economic frustration is too easily converted into physical aggression.”
Researchers caution, however, against portraying communities as inert. Grass-roots leaders, notably parish women’s associations and local Imams’ councils, have begun to embed anti-violence messages in premarital counselling and Friday sermons. Their efforts could constitute a cultural lever, provided they are systematically connected to state-level prevention strategies.
Government Frameworks and Reforms
The Republic of the Congo has taken notable legislative steps over the past decade to align with the Maputo Protocol and the Sustainable Development Goals. The 2019 Criminal Code revision expanded the definition of sexual violence and introduced stiffer penalties for domestic assault, while the 2022-2026 National Gender Policy earmarks 0.8 percent of the annual budget for prevention and care initiatives. The Ministry of Social Affairs points to a 47-percent rise in state-funded shelter beds since 2021 as evidence of progress.
In a brief statement following the Kaani launch, Minister of the Promotion of Women, Inés Nefer Ingani, welcomed the contribution. “Civil-society data complement the government’s monitoring system and will inform the mid-term review of our action plan,” she said, pledging to convene a technical round-table with police and medical stakeholders before the end of the first quarter of 2026.
International partners have equally signalled support. The French Development Agency, already financing a justice-sector digitalisation project, is assessing whether to extend its grant to include an integrated GBV case-tracking module. UNFPA, for its part, confirmed that a new consignment of forensic kits would arrive early next year, partly offsetting the shortages lamented by hospitals.
Toward a Co-ordinated Data System
Perhaps the report’s most actionable recommendation is the creation of a single national observatory for gender-based violence, modelled on Côte d’Ivoire’s One-Stop Centre system. Presently, health records, police files and social-work registers operate on parallel tracks, hampering real-time analysis. A harmonised platform, Kaani argues, would enable authorities to map hotspots, allocate resources and measure the impact of awareness campaigns with far greater precision.
To jump-start the process, the NGO has launched an online survey inviting survivors to share anonymous testimonies. Within one week of publication, more than four hundred responses had been logged, a testament both to unmet demand for safe disclosure and to widening internet penetration across the Congo. Data engineers from local start-up Mosaiko Tech are volunteering to clean and encrypt submissions before they are shared with institutional partners.
“Statistics alone will not end violence, but they are the compass without which interventions drift,” Gangoue insists. Her cautionary words resonate at a time when the government is finalising its digital transformation agenda. Embedding GBV metrics into that architecture could ensure that the fight against violence does not run on a separate, under-resourced track.
A Call for Collective Vigilance
Kaani Assistance closes its 68-page study with a guarded optimism. The scale of the challenge is undeniable, the organisation concedes, yet the country has at its disposal a constellation of legal instruments, community networks and burgeoning technological capacity. The imperative now is alignment. If survivors are to move from the margins to the centre of public policy, data, budgets and cultural narratives must converge.
Observers note that 2026 offers a window of opportunity. The mid-term evaluation of the National Development Plan and the review cycle of Congo’s Universal Periodic Review at the United Nations both fall that year, potentially galvanising cross-ministry coordination. For every survivor whose story reaches a courthouse or counselling room, several remain invisible. Making them visible, the report concludes, is the first act of protection.
