Best practice for creating a 'global' config class used by numerous components

Question

I have a large project with a driver part and about 5 libraries doing various associated tasks. Many of the libraries require access to 'global' configuration data which is read from a database at startup by the driver code. By driver I just mean the part which contains the main function.

My idea on how to handle this was to create a config class with a static method to get the config items. Is this the best approach? How else could this be achieved?

eg:

class config {
 public:
   static get_item(key);

 private:
   static values;
};

Is singleton design appropriate here?