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| Zambia's PRSP implementation and its priorities |
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4. Sectoral Concerns of Civil Society
The following section focuses on some sectors which Civil Society believes are key areas in reducing poverty in Zambia. For poverty reduction strategies in Zambia, civil society identified 10 key areas namely Employment and Sustainable, Environment, Gender, Agriculture and Food Security, Mining, Tourism, Health and HIV/AIDS, Education, child and youth, Governance and Macroeconomic issues. Out of these, civil society prioritized education, health, agriculture and land.
Education and health are key components of both economic and human development. It is a common agreement worldwide that for any community to develop, members must be educated. It is also widely accepted that for human beings to be economically productive, they must be mentally and physically healthy. Quality education and health systems facilitate and promote people’s participation in contribution to, and enjoyment of economic benefits.
Therefore, any dialogue on national and sustainable development must always take education and health as critical issues. These are also essential human rights.
Civil society strongly believes that one of Zambia’s major determinants of economic development is agriculture. From agriculture, the Zambians get food, employment, and trade. Improvements in the agricultural sector will definitely mean good to all Zambians, both in the rural and urban areas. Closely linked to this is the question of land.
4.1 Social Development Concerns
The Relevance of Education and Health for Poverty Reduction
Unfortunately for Zambia, the education and health sectors continue falling into a deepening crisis. Both sectors show a significant deterioration in infrastructural set-up and services delivery systems that is characterized by:
- Government services are sharply cut
- Declined utilization of available services
- Dilapidated infrastructure and poor services
- Inadequate staff and bad working conditions
- Poor co-ordination and management
For both sectors, a key element preventing the poor from accessing services has been the “cost sharing” policy. The current economic hardship, characterized by drops in real wages and family incomes alongside increased expenditure on school and health fees, has aggravated the effects of this policy. Civil Society has made several attempts to question the appropriateness of cost sharing in view of the social and economic situation in Zambia.
The PRSP has recommended:
- To develop and implement mechanisms that ensure the accessibility of education and health facilities for all, especially the poor;
- To motivate the workers in order to provide quality service;
- To improve management and co-ordination of activities to facilitate planning and implementation of programmes;
- To provide equipment and relevant materials to facilitate delivery of improved services.
- To rehabilitate and develop new infrastructure for the provision of quality services.
It is the expectation of the Zambian people that implementing these recommendations will result in:
- Increased access to services;
- Improved capacity of service providers.
- Improved quality of services.
If properly implemented, the PRSP would present a solid base for sustainable development in Zambia. However, unless certain lessons drawn from past experience are taken into consideration, the success of PRSP in Zambia still remains questionable.
Effective implementation of the PRSP education and health activities in Zambia poses a serious challenge to both the Government of Zambia and the donor community, namely to articulate a clear policy framework that defines the commitments of all actors.
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Priorities
With view to the current deteriorating health and education conditions of Zambia, priorities must be based on the most pressing needs of the people. In setting priorities, it is important to focus on how to overcome the constraints, such as limited resources, on basic health and education in Zambia. It is important to ensure that the expectations of the Zambian people with respect to education and health services are respected by focusing efforts on these areas. The priorities set must truly reflect commitment to the stated goals in the PRSP.
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Funding
Zambia is facing severe financial difficulties. This problem is both a cause and effect of the country’s deepening poverty, rising external debt and ultimately limiting Government’s ability to respond to the education and health crises. Unless there is a major increase in financial, technical and human resources, the future of health and education in Zambia will remain bleak.
Increased Allocations:
The new PRSP approaches should redirect public spending to health and education needs of the Zambian people. For the PRSP activities to succeed, there must be sufficient resources invested in human development, physical infrastructure as well as institutional and capacity building related to service delivery in these fields. For this, Zambia will need to mobilize more resources through a combination of Government and external efforts. The donor community can assist, most immediately by significantly increasing their assistance and provide more debt relief through HIPC. Civil society is calling upon the donor community and Government of Zambia to raise funding levels to these two key sectors. Reductions and untimely release of resource flows will make it difficult to achieve the goals set in these sectors.
Guaranteed funding: As civil society, we continue expressing our concern that budget allocations to the social sector is generally left to external assistance. A good example is that both, the 2001 and 2002 national budgets have left the funding of most programmes in education and health to external partners. This is a substantial risk because, as experienced last year, only a few donors fulfilled their pledges. Some major programmes in health and education were adversely affected by budget constraints and the government was forced into further borrowing. We would like to urge the donors to adhere to their commitments so that activities in health and education can be implemented as planned. We would also like to call upon Government to take full responsibility for providing quality education and health services to its citizens.
Efficiency in resource utilization: As civil society we will continue to press for, and monitor, the internal efficiency in the use of domestic and external resources allocated to education and health.
Sectoral concerns: In education, the donors’ funding has been directed mainly to basic education, at the expense of high school and tertiary, adult and early childhood education. Acknowledging how closely linked these are, it is important that fair attention be given to all of them. On the question of health, from a poverty point of view it is important that emphasis is placed on basic health care, rather than on specialized programmes, since, a lot more Zambians would benefit from this.
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Coordination
Effective implementation of the PRSP activities in health and education greatly depends on clear and good coordination strategies. In the past, poor coordination has contributed to the poor performance of well-designed activities. All key stakeholders in the PRSP should ensure that measures are properly structured to focus their support to the established priorities. The overall coordination strategy must encompass all, including civil society, government and donors.
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Monitoring and Evaluation
Monitoring and evaluation of the PRSP activities in education and health will be particularly important. It will help to set priorities, plan and implement the interventions in education and health. It is the view of civil society that the Monitoring and Evaluation components must be strong and participatory in order to win the wider support of the Zambians. Participatory M&E processes will enhance the ownership of the PRSP activities in health and education.
4.2 Economic Development Concerns
The Relevance of Agricultural Development for Poverty Reduction
Despite the well-known agricultural potential of Zambia, the performance of this sector in the last decade has been quite poor. Agriculture generates almost 20% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and it provides the livelihood for more than 60% of the people. Poor agriculture performance, and in particular the decrease in food production, is the major cause for a worsening of rural poverty and the hunger and food insecurity that has hit its climax this year. According to the report obtained from OXFAM, an IMF evaluation conducted between 1991 and 1994 revealed that liberalisation of state marketing had contributed to a 30% increase in rural poverty.
Civil society contends that it is mainly detrimental agricultural policies which have lead to the continuous decline of this sector. Through the PRSP consultation process, civil society identified the following as the key constraints to effective development of agriculture in Zambia.
- Lack of access to farm inputs
- Lack of access to agricultural credit
- Lack of access to reliable markets and market information
- Lack of an effective farmer organization
- Lack of extension services
- Poor infrastructure
- Price of commodities
- Access to agricultural land
It is undoubted, that in order to fulfill its crucial role in the development of the economy in Zambia, especially for poverty reduction, the performance of agriculture has to be greatly and urgently improved. The PRSP agenda for agricultural development sets out responsibilities for both Government and the donor community to promote the recovery of this crisis-ridden sector from a poverty reduction angle. Civil society calls upon the donor community to concentrate their actions on the following aspects of agricultural development:
- Food security and diversification
- Agricultural Finance and Investment
- Agro-business and Market Development
- Agricultural Research and Extension
- Natural Resources Management
Recognizing agriculture as being crucial to the economic recovery and poverty reduction, Civil Society sees that, after 10 years of fruitless liberalization policies in agriculture, Zambia may need to pursue a different route. With Zambia’s endowments in agriculture, Civil Society sees no reason why people must be starving and why activities in this sector continue eroding, most of all, why we are now failing to manage our affairs in agriculture. In order to overcome the current constraints in agriculture, civil society urges both the donor community and government to pay particular attention to the following concerns:
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Policy
Lack of clear policy framework and removal of subsidies accompanied by liberalization of agricultural marketing and supply of input, worsened by weak monitoring and evaluation procedures, have crippled the agriculture sector. Civil society calls upon the government and the donor community to ensure that Zambia develops a framework for radical new reforms strongly based on the Zambian peoples’ needs. This framework is important for proper implementation of PRSP activities in agriculture. Civil society is convinced that Zambia must reintroduce subsidies in agricultural production and that Government must play a key role in regulating this sector.
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Priorities
The majority of Zambians involved in farming fall in the category of medium and small-scale farmers (including small scale farmers). This sector has been highly ignored by government. It is important for both the donor community and government to turn back and support the progress of small and medium-scale agriculture, which greatly contributed to the food basket in Zambia not so many years ago. Civil society has also observed that consultation processes in the agriculture sector have totally collapsed. In most cases, only the commercial and export oriented producers are consulted and participate in decision making, resulting in policies and programmes that do not match the interests of medium and small-scale farmers. As Civil Society, we call upon Government to move faster in resuscitating community and non-political co-operatives in order to enhance the participation of all the actors in this sector.
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Coordination
The implementation of fragmented agriculture support programmes and services have caused confusion. Most of the programmes have been at a small scale and usually for short-term purposes. To make a great turn in the agricultural sector, Zambia needs long-term activities and better co-ordination is vital. It leads to effective management, utilization of resources and proper monitoring.
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Finance
It has been a great concern to civil society that funding to agriculture has been inadequate. Furthermore, funding has not been directed to the most needful sub-sectors of small and medium-scale farmers. Another feature is that most of the funding has been coming as loans from our external partners. It is the view of civil society that the improvement of agriculture must be seen as a national responsibility and should be given priority. Therefore, civil society calls upon the donor community and government to ensure that
- More resources are allocated to the agricultural sector, especially programmes aimed at improving food production.
- New funding must be directed towards the identified PRSP interventions areas.
- Instead of heavy borrowing and/or lending for agricultural purposes more grants and prudent use of these, accompanied by good policies and planning, can rescue the agriculture sector in Zambia.
Concerns of Civil Society on Land Policy
In its Land Policy document, the Zambian Government recognizes the imnportance of land as “the basis for all human survival in terms of social and economic development” (GRZ, 2002). Indeed, it is the most fundamental resource in any society. Land also provides the safety net for families in times of crisis. Therefore, poverty reduction in Zambia cannot be achieved without addressing the issue of land. This has not adequately been done so far. Concerns of Civil Society about the legal basis, the Lands Act of 1995, include:
- The meaning of land in the Act excludes mining rights. This works against the poor whose land is being used by miners.
- The mere approval of land applications by a chief ignores that in customary law, the chief does not actually own land, but simply holds it on behalf of the people.
- The land administration system is too cumbersome, long and costly for poor people. Numerous cases of abuse in land administration have been reported.
- The Land Development Fund, meant to improve access to land for developers, is usually inaccessible by the district councils and rural people.
- The provision on illegal occupation of vacant land does not give adequate consideration to the case of people who have occupied land for a very long time.
- The Lands Tribunal which is meant to benefit poor people in resolving conflicts is inaccessible to most poor people.
- Implicitly, the Act considers customary land tenure inferior to modern or statutory tenure, rendering holding of land under customary tenure at risk of losing land.
- Finally, the law ignores that, historically, women have not had access, ownership and control over land. In addition, the long, costly and cumbersome land administration system works to the disadvantage of women. This is not balanced by a gender sensitive framework.
The Government has in theory recognised the weaknesses in the Lands Act of 1995. But it only mentions the need to “discuss with traditional communities incentives for opening up unutilised land for investment.” The PRSP does not explicitly oblige Government to involve wider civil society (traditional leaders, communities, NGOs, the church, etc.) in the process of review of the 1995 Lands Act. Civil Society urges the Government to review both, the Land Policy and the Lands Act. The review process must involve a wider representation from civil society so that the concerns outlined above are taken care of.
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