Major challenges

DFID: Working to reduce poverty in Zambia

Governance | Health | HIV/AIDS | Education | Humanitarian/ social protection | Results

This financial year, DFID will give around £48 million of development assistance
to Zambia. About two thirds of this will go towards Poverty Reduction Budget Support (PRBS), which we have been providing to the government of Zambia since 2005.

Governance

Poor governance is a principal cause of poverty. People suffer when governments don’t allow participation in political life, provide access to justice, deliver adequate public services or control corruption. Serious problems with governance still exist in much of Africa but the overall situation is improving.

For example, in September 2006 the Zambian government began implementing a new public service management programme, the main goal of which is to improve the delivery of services for Zambian citizens and create an appropriate institutional environment for reducing poverty. To do this, it will focus on empowering citizens and clients to put legitimate pressure on Zambia’s public services to do better, as well as on measures such as employment and pay reform.

DFID is working with the Zambian government in the following areas:

• improving financial transparency of public funds by providing £15 million to the government’s Public Expenditure Management and Financial Accountability Programme over five years
• working alongside other donors to support the government’s Anti- Corruption Commission, including assistance to implement the National Anti-Corruption Policy, which was approved by the Zambian government in March 2009 and will embed anti-corruption initiatives in ministries by establishing an integrity office within each one
• co-operating with civil society, particularly on advocacy, strengthening the demand for good governance and making sure that the voices of the poor are heard
• supporting the Public Service Management Programme, which is designed to make government more efficient and responsive in managing public funds and delivering services
• providing £1.4 million to support a parliamentary reform programme to strengthen the ability of Zambia’s National Assembly to scrutinise the way government carries out its work and increase the accessibility of MPs to their constituents.

Health

Some aspects of Zambia’s healthcare delivery have progressed, particularly in the areas of malaria control and treatment and getting people on to HIV treatment.

More recently, there has also been an improvement in child mortality. However, Zambia remains severely off track on achieving the Millennium Development Goal target on maternal mortality (see MDGs below).

Results from the 2007 Demographic Health Survey suggest a significant improvement in the maternal mortality rate reducing from 729 (2002) to 591 (2007), but the drivers behind this reduction are not fully understood, and further investigation is need to identify what the successful strategies were.

The lack of trained health workers is one of the greatest challenges facing the Zambian health sector, which is managing with only 50% of the staff it needs to meet minimum standards. In addition, almost a third of rural facilities have no trained health workers at all. We have been supporting the Ministry of Health to implement its Human Resources Strategy to try to address these challenges.

Zambia is one of seven ‘first wave’ countries worldwide selected to join the International Health Partnership. This initiative aims to improve the way that international agencies, donors and poor countries work together to develop and implement health plans.

In early 2006, the Zambian government announced the removal of user fees for primary health care in rural areas, an important 'pro-poor' policy change. Through PRBS, DFID will provide $25 million over five years to help fund the 30% increase in demand that this policy has produced.

HIV/AIDS

Zambia is experiencing one of the world’s most serious HIV/AIDS epidemics, with 14.3% of the adult population infected. DFID is working closely with other partners to help tackle this.

Our five-year £20 million programme supports the National AIDS Council, provides public commodities including condoms, helps to strengthen civil society and assists with HIV workplace programmes. The programme is coming to an end in the next couple of months, and we are in the process of designing a new programme to take forward our HIV/AIDS reponse.

These efforts – combined with those of other donor partners, including the World Bank, the US government and the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria – have helped Zambia to achieve the following:

• 200,000 people receiving lifesaving anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment by December 2008 – a huge increase from the 3,000 who received treatment in 2003
• 39% of all HIV-positive expectant mothers receiving a full course of ARV treatment (2007).

Education

Budget support (and growth in domestic revenues) helped the government increase spending on education from US$82 million to $400 million between 2000 and 2006. In addition, in 2007, external partners provided $68.5 million directly to support the education sector’s strategic plan. These combined efforts have helped Zambia to achieve the following:

• 95.4% of children enrolled in primary schools in 2006 (compared to 68% in 2000)
• an improvement in the ratio of girls in basic education compared with boys (gender parity index), from 0.93 in 2002 to 0.96 in 2006.

Humanitarian relief and social protection

Some 51% of Zambia’s population are unable to meet basic food needs, and 45% of its children suffer from stunted growth, indicating chronic malnutrition.

Humanitarian relief helps people in years of extreme need – for example, when there are droughts or floods.

We are therefore providing approximately £2.7m in 2008/09 for humanitarian relief. This assistance included support to WFP’s relief and recovery programme for flood victims and an urban voucher programme to deal with cases of severe malnutrition among children. Support was also given to UNICEF’s emergency nutrition programme to address severe cases of child malnutrition in rural districts.

In addition, recognising that many extreme poor households go hungry even in good years, and can become even more vulnerable over time as a result of recurrent shocks – for instance, death of a breadwinner through AIDS or loss of crops due to a drought, DFID is supporting the Government of Zambia to put in place basic social safety nets for the poorest households, with no means of making a living.

DFID’s support for the implementation of the national social protection policy involves:

• funding pilots of a social cash transfer programme in five districts, which has so far provided 11,000 households with regular cash grants and will provide evidence to help the government make decisions on the design of a future national social assistance programme
• currently we are designing a new, expanded social protection programme with GRZ (German development agency) which will run social pensions, child and family grants targeted at the poorest households in the poorest districts

Results

Poverty data for Zambia over the last decade is very weak, largely as a result of a series of quality and methodological problems with poverty surveys.

Zambia needs to have a much more robust picture of progress against the MDGs and Zambia’s Fifth National Development Plan so that the government, and donors, can demonstrate where results are being achieved and identify where expected progress is not being made.

DFID, alongside other partners, is working to build the Zambian government’s capacity to monitor and report progress. This will include:

• strengthening the national statistics body to improve the quality and timeliness of statistical outputs
• Developing a comparable time series of poverty levels for the past ten years and supporting the 2009 poverty survey
• ensuring that the 2010 census goes ahead and that it provides reliable data
• Supporting the development of SMART monitoring frameworks for national and DFID programmes