Make a Difference
Poverty Reduction
Impact: Reduction of Rural Poverty
What does it mean to be poor? How do you measure wealth in countries without a culture of cash savings? Many African cultures measure a family’s wealth by the number of cattle they have, or the number of children they raise.UNDP has an array of indicators for assessing poverty, as shown in the table, which lists Zambia’s rank among the world’s countries, followed by the actual percentile, in brackets.
| UNDP selected indicators of human poverty for Zambia | ||||
| Human Poverty Index (HPI-1) | Probability of not surviving to age 40 (%) | Adult illiteracy rate (%ages 15 and above) | People not using an improved water source (%) | Children underweight for age (% aged under 5) |
| 110. Zambia (35.5) | 151. Zambia (42.9) | 115. Zambia (29.4) | 133. Zambia (42) | 90. Zambia (20) |
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In Zambia, poverty means girl children don’t get sent to school. It means skipping meals. It means no electricity or running water. At present, the most direct way COMACO has of assessing poverty is to measure income levels. Mean annual member household income showed an increase from 2001 to 2008, based on three survey samples from the same five chiefdoms. Mean values in 2001, 2006 and 2008 were K176,847 (+ 239,122, N = 501), K458,867 (+ 271,100, N=868), and ZK 520,922 (+ 622,430, N = 546), respectively. |
COMACO member income levels earned |
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When standardizing against the current exchange, the differences in income become even clearer, $35 in 2001 (ZK5000 = $1), $127 in 2006 (ZK3600 = $1), and $149 2008 (ZK3500 = $1). |
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This increase in farming income is attributed largely to income from crop diversification, specifically cotton and rice, the latter also supported by value-added processing and price support from COMACO in the form of IT’S WILD! product marketing. While these numbers may sound small, COMACO has been targeting the most economically challenged sector of rural Zambia; many of these households have never had a reliable income of any kind – sustaining themselves in a cash-free setting through subsistence and barter. Statistics from www.zamstats.gov indicate that only about one in every three households had mean monthly incomes that exceeded K 300, 000; meaning that the majority of Zambian households, or approximately 65 percent, had incomes below the basic needs level. This survey was conducted nationwide and did not differentiate between urban and rural incomes. |
A recent study focusing specifically on rural families in Zambia reported an annual income of $136.77 for Mutotoshi, a town in rural central Zambia – far less than the $800 estimated by zamstats. This may indicate that COMACO households have moved from being the poorest of the poor, to having incomes that match the average for rural earners.
To put it another way, the average cost of sending a child to primary school is about K150,000 per term, with school meeting 3 terms per year. Many Zambian kids attend school sporadically – attending only when there’s money enough. Earning K500,000+ per year with COMACO may well put primary school back on track for thousands of Zambian kids!
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