1 A research NGO operating in the shadows Steven Spittaels & Jeroen Cuvelier Introduction Belgium is still one of the most important partners of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), together with the United States and the United Kingdom. This is evidenced, amongst other things, by the level of its development aid. In 2007, Belgium’s official development assistance to the DRC amounted to 154.449.686 euros. In the same year, the Belgian Directorate- General for Development Cooperation (DGDC) had a budget of 75.107.398 at its disposal for the DRC. It spent 22.598.782 euros on non-governmental cooperation. Unsurprisingly, Congo is the primary concentration country of Belgian NGOs. At the moment, there are 28 Belgian NGO programmes in the DRC 1 . The International Peace Information Service (IPIS), an independent research institute based in Antwerp, is one of the NGOs that receive funding from the Belgian government in order to contribute to Congo’s development 2 . As will be explained further on in this chapter, the core business of IPIS is to write reports and articles on the basis of in-depth research on the arms trade, the exploitation of natural resources and corporate social responsibility. There are two reasons why it seems appropriate to describe IPIS as a ‘research NGO operating in the shadows’. First of all, a lot of our research concerns economic activities that take place outside the control of the Congolese government and that do not appear in official statistics. These shadow economic activities are part of what MacGaffey has described as the ‘second economy’, that is, ‘economic activities that are unmeasured, unrecorded, and, 1 Written question nr. 4-2209 of Alain Destexhe (MR) to the Belgian Minister of Development Cooperation. Answer of Charles Michel on 13 February 2009. 2 It should be noted that IPIS does not only do research on the Democratic Republic of Congo, but also on several other countries in Sub-Sahara Africa.