Too Rich to Be Poor? A Glimpse of the Poverty Situation in Zambia in the 1990s

For all its huge natural and human resource endowments, Zambia is suffering from intolerably high levels of both rural and urban poverty. The authors explore the causes of poverty, which include government policy bias against agriculture, the negative impact of World Bank and IMF conditionality, the disadvantaged position of women-headed rural households, and the devastating 1991-1992 drought. They identify and discuss the coping strategies that both the rural and the urban poor have been forced to adopt in order to survive. Among the urban poor some of the many ways of combating poverty include changing eating habits, 'street kidding' (school children who engage in income-generating activities), begging, street vending, prostitution, informal income-generating activities, beer brewing, crime, gambling, and cultivating vegetables and raising chickens in the backyard. The rural poor have, in addition, resorted to selling livestock, burning trees for charcoal, gathering wild fruits, casual work on the more established commercial farms, and petty thieving. These coping mechanisms are at best unsustainable, at worst highly indadequate, in halting the slippage of the poor into deeper poverty. The authors conclude with some general indications on what needs to be done