Zambia

UNDP Zambia has published five National Human Development Reports since 1997. 

2007 Zambia National Human Development Report: Place households at the centre of the national HIV and AIDS response

The report gives fifty recommendations for enhancing household capacity to respond to HIV and AIDS. The report recommends that the national HIV and AIDS response should take the household as its starting point. 2007 Zambia Human Development Report was launched in February 2007 at the Copperbelt University in Kitwe.
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Download the Youth Friendly Version of the report

Zambia National Human Development Report 2003

The Reduction of Poverty and Hunger in Zambia: An Agenda for Enhancing the Achievement of the Millennium Development Goals

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Zambia National Human Development Report 1999/2000: Employment and Sustainable Livelihoods

(Not available online)

ZHDR 1999/2000 addressed the theme of Employment and Sustainable Livelihoods (ESL), which is defined as “a condition where the activities, capital and entitlements of the population are combined in a way that maximizes resilience, economic efficiency, ecological integrity and social equity.”  That is to say, while this concept seeks to enhance access and ownership of assets and resources to boost income-earning activities, especially of the poor, it moves beyond that.

The Report explored Zambia’s rich potential to achieve sustainable growth and to ensure sustainable livelihoods thereby promoting sustainable human development.  The report noted that, despite this potential, human development has been deteriorating since 1985.  The adverse social and economic conditions that Zambia has been encountering since then have reversed the human development achievements made after 1975, a situation that is not comparable with the experience of any other country in the world.  Consequently, Zambia now has a much longer distance to travel to attain desirable levels of human development that guarantee employment and sustainable livelihoods for the majority of her people.  The report brought out the need for Government and other stakeholders to fully recognize the resources available for generating employment opportunities and promoting sustainable livelihoods, not only economic, physical and natural capital, but also human capital, including existing indigenous knowledge systems and social relations.  In a country like Zambia where poverty is widespread and formal employment opportunities have lagged behind the demands of a growing population, it is clear that the quality of economic growth that is desired is one that is pro-poor, promotes employment and guarantees sustainable livelihoods to its people.

Among the main policy interventions, which the report highlighted as essential for sustainable livelihoods and human development, were:

• Enhancing the participation of the people in devising development options, making them more people centered;
• Raising the human capital status of the country to enable people, especially the youth, to become more productive and better able to pursue their livelihood strategies;
• Combating the devastating impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic;
• Promoting formal and urban informal sector employment; and
• Ensuring appropriate utilization of natural resources.

Zambia National Human Development Report 1998: Provision of Basic Services

(Not available online)

The second ZHDR produced in 1998 focused on the Provision of Basic Social Services and showed that the provision, access and use of basic social services in Zambia was inadequate and that the state of the basic services such as education, health, water and sanitation had sharply deteriorated.

The Report brought out the highly deteriorated state of the social sectors and the inadequacy in the provision, access and use of basic social services.  The impact of such inadequacy was particularly felt in the rural areas where 55% of the population is illiterate compared with 27% in the urban areas.  Only 52% of households had access to health facilities within a 5-kilometer distance compared with 100% in urban areas and only 27% of households had access to safe water compared with 85% in urban areas.

Besides rural-urban inequality, the Report also highlighted other forms of inequality that exist, based on income, gender and geographic locations in terms of centrality.  The Report supplemented the 1997 Human Development Index and Human Poverty Index calculations with calculations of the Gender Empowerment measure (GEM) and the Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index (IAHDI).  It was noted that while the HDI value had marginally improved between 1990 and 1996, the IAHDI had declined during the same period, clearly demonstrating the impact of inequality on human development in Zambia.  The report also calculated a new Index of Participation (IoP) that measures the changes in the levels of peoples’ participation over time.  This index is shown to have declined between 1990/91 and 1995/96.

Zambia National Human Development Report 1997: Poverty

(Not available online)

The first ZDHR was produced in 1997 with Poverty as its theme.  It reviewed the progress and challenges that Zambia faced during the 1990s in promoting human development, and showed that poverty was high in Zambia with nearly 70% of the population below the poverty line.  The Report showed that while poverty remained pervasive in Zambia, there had been some improvement in the human condition and the level of poverty during that decade.  Most noteworthy was the fact that the improvements had been greater in the rural areas than in the urban. While the poverty situation in Lusaka worsened between 1990 and 1996, it improved fairly significantly in North-Western, Eastern, Northern, Western and Southern Provinces over the same period, and moderately in the others, except Luapula Province, which remained practically the same.  The challenge for the future will be the extent to which the support of community based organizations, NGOs, the private sector, donors and civil society at large can be successfully mobilized to complement