Congo has been on the list of the world's most neglected crises every year it has existed

The Norwegian Refugee Council has published an annual ranking of the world's most neglected displacement crises since 2016. It is an unusual list, because it does not measure suffering. It measures indifference.

Four things are scored: how badly underfunded the response is, how little media coverage the crisis gets, how little international political and diplomatic effort is going into solving it, and how many people have been displaced.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been on that list every year it has existed. In the edition published on 4 June 2026, it placed second, behind Sudan.

Ten years is not a run of bad luck

10

consecutive years on the most-neglected list, since the ranking began in 2016

27.4%

of the required humanitarian funding provided in 2025 — the lowest coverage in ten years

21m+

people NRC counted as needing humanitarian assistance

NRC also published a figure that is easier to feel than a percentage. A decade ago the response had about $55 for each person identified as in need. It now has under $33.

The response has less money per person than it did ten years ago, and more people to cover.

What the 2026 plan actually promises

On 28 January 2026, OCHA published DR Congo's humanitarian plan for the year. The numbers describe a response that has been deliberately narrowed.

• People identified as in need14.9m
• People the plan targets7.3m

The plan asks for $1.4 billion. The 2025 plan received 24 per cent of what it requested.

The clearest sign of what prioritisation means in practice is geographic. The 2026 response covers 228 health zones. In 2025 it covered 332.

Bruno Lemarquis, the humanitarian coordinator for DR Congo, described the position as forcing "extremely difficult, sometimes impossible, choices."

A note on two different numbers

Readers comparing sources will find two figures for how many people in DR Congo need help: NRC's over 21 million, and OCHA's 2026 plan figure of 14.9 million.

They are not in conflict, and neither is wrong. They come from different documents, describing different years, using different scopes — and the 2026 plan explicitly narrowed the ground it covers, from 332 health zones to 228.

We flag it because the honest reading matters. A smaller number in a planning document is not evidence that fewer people are suffering. It can just as easily be evidence that fewer people are being counted.

The part that has no funding line

Lemarquis made a second point that rarely survives into headlines: humanitarian assistance saves lives, but it does not address why the crisis exists.

Eastern Congo's displacement is produced by armed conflict, by contested control of mineral-rich territory, and by a political settlement that has never held. None of those appear in an appeal document, because none of them can be bought.

Diplomatic attention is one of the four things NRC measures, and it is where Congo has scored worst for a decade.