the scarcity of good jobs, which are concentrated in the city core, poor accessibility due to limited connective infrastructure and transport system further reduces job opportunities for people living in the outskirts. In fact, those people with inadequate job accessibility in Kinshasa are poorer, female, and/or young workers. This suggests that a mismatch in the labor market could be effectively reduced by complementing labor policies that support disadvantaged workers (such as female and young workers) with spatial interventions to enhance their mobility and access to economic opportunities.

This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 explains the data used in this paper and describes the labor force and employment conditions in Kinshasa. Section 3 assesses the employment conditions by examining who engages in better/worse jobs and how jobs are spatially distributed. Section 4 concludes.

# **2. Data and background**

## **2.1 Data**

The analysis of this paper relies primarily on a recently collected household survey in Kinshasa. Conducted by the INS of the DRC under the World Bank’s statistical operation in the country, it is an integrated survey, consisting of two surveys, targeting individuals and households. The first part of the survey includes sociodemographic characteristics, education, health, living conditions, employment, urban agriculture and non-agricultural household entrepreneurship. The second component is the household consumption survey.

The Kinshasa Household Survey was collected in two 18-day phases between mid-October and the end of November 2018 on a sample of 2,592 households. Given the outdated last population census—which was collected in 1984—the sampling method for the Kinshasa Household Survey was based on high-resolution satellite imagery. A two-stage stratified sampling design with equal allocation of first-degree enumeration area (EAs) was used for the survey. Kinshasa had been divided into two clusters: urban and rural. The 23 communes/districts of the city were considered as urban and some areas of Maluku, as part of the survey, were considered rural.

Two criteria were used to stratify the city (a) the building density of EAs and (b) typology of Kinshasa areas. The stratification of EAs according to the density criterion was carried out as follows: 1) Low density; fewer than 10 buildings per hectare, 2) Medium density; from 10 to 20 buildings per hectare, and 3) High density; more than 20 buildings per hectare. Precarious neighborhoods are those not suitable for habitation. In the survey, precarious areas are defined based on their characteristics of dwellings and geographic and environmental features.

- Precarious areas. This is a neighborhood whose dwellings are built by the occupants on land acquired in undeveloped areas, on farmland and market gardens, or on uneven ground (exposure to erosion and flooding). Buildings are anarchic and the use of recycled materials (cardboard, plastics, and sheet metal) is common. Most often, they are located in parts of the city abandoned by the more affluent categories: on steep slopes or near industrial areas, which makes them all the more dangerous and where misery is concentrated. Collective facilities (water, electricity, sanitation, and transport) are reduced and availability is low.

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