Establishing a functional pathology laboratory in a tertiary hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in Africa presents many challenges. From a microbiological perspective the production of quality media for culture, identification and sensitivity testing of isolates from a range of clinical specimens has been our biggest challenge. Commercially prepared media is not available in the DRC. It takes weeks to courier the dehydrated culture media and supplements from Sydney to the DRC. The electricity supply is unreliable, water is of doubtful quality, refrigeration minimal and there are various sources of blood for blood based products. Local atmospheric conditions can also reduce the shelf life of some dehydrated media considerably. Despite these challenges and “abuse” of the media components it is possible to produce media of a sufficient standard to perform diagnostic microbiology.